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ADAM BEDE.

GEORGE ELIOT.

" So that ye may ha'.'S
Clear Images before your gladden .■(! eyes
Of nature's unambitious underwood,
And flowers that prosper in the shadj. And v.-hou
I speak of such among the flock as swerved
Or fell, those only shall be singled out
Upon whose lapse, or error, something moi'o
Than brotherly forgiveness may attend."

—Wordsworth.

NEW EDITION— COMPLETE IN ONE VOLUME.

NEW YORK:
JOHN B. ALDEN.

1884.

iCi>?9l3

CONTENTS.

Chav.

Page.

I. The Workshop - » - • •

- 5

II. The Preaching . . . -

III. After the Preaching . . . -

• 3°

IV. Home and its Sorrows ...

V. The Rector - . - • " -

- 49

VI. The Hall Farm ....

VII. The Dairy . . - • -

- 76

VIII. A Vocation - . - - .

IX. Hetty's World

- 88

X. Dinah Visits Lisbeth - . . -

XI. In the Cottage - - - • -

- 105

XII. In the Wood - - - - -

XIII. Evening in the Wood ....

- 123

XIV. The Return Home ....

128

XV. The Two Bed-Chambers - • -

- 136

XVI. Links

148

XVII. In which the Story Pauses a Little

160

XVI 11. Chuich

168

XIX. Adam on a Working-Day ...

. 188

XX. Adam Visits the Hall Farm -

194

XXI. The Night-School and the Schoolmaster

211

XXII. Going to the Birthday Feast

225

XXIII. Dinner-Time .....

- 234

XXIV, The Health Drinking

239

XXV. The Games - - ' -

246

XXVI. The Dance ......

253

XXVII. A Crisis ......

263

XXVIII. A Dilemma

273

XXIX. The Next Morning ....

- 280

XXX The Delivery of the Letter.

287

XXXI. In Hetty's Bed-Chamber

299

XXXII. Mrs. Poyser " Has Her Say Ov^" -

307

XXXI! :. M',rcT.ir,k^

•?i6

CONTENTS.

Chaf.

Pags.

XXXIV.

The Betrothal . • •

322

XXXV.

The Hidden Dread . - •

- 326

XXXVI.

The Journey in Hope . . •

331

XXXVII.

The Journey in Despair • •

• 339

XXXVIII.

The Quest - - - - -

35'

XXXIX.

The Tidings ....

. 364

The Bitter Waters Spread - - -

370

XLI.

The Eve of the Trial - - - •

- 379

XLII.

The Morning of the Trial - - .

383

XLIII.

The Verdict ....

- 388

XLIV.

Arthur's Return ....

394

XLV.

In the Prison ....

. 401

XLVI.

The Hours of Suspense ...

410

XLVII.

The Last Moment

• 4I6

XLVIII.

Another Meeting in the Wood • •

417

XLIX.

At the Hall Farm

. 425

In the Cottage ....

434

LI.

Sunday Morning ...

- 444

LII.

Adam and Dinah ....

455

LIII.

The Harvest Supper

. 463

LIV.

The Meeting on the Hill ...

474

LV.

Marriage Bells - . . .

- 479

Epilogue • • • • •

481

ADAM BEDE,

CHAPTER I.

THE WORKSHOP.

With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sor-
cerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching
l/isions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you,
reader. With this drop of ink at the end of my pen I will
ihow you the roomy workshop of Mr. Jonathan Burge, car-
penter and builder, in the village of Hayslope, as it appeared
on the eighteenth of June, in the year of our Lord 1799.

The afternoon sun was warm on the five workmen there,
busy upon doors and window-frames and wainscoting. A
scent of pine wood from a tent-like pile of planks outside the
open door mingled itself with the scent of the elder-bushes
which were spreading their summer snow close to the open
window opposite ; the slanting sunbeams shone through the
transparent shavings that flew before the steady plane, and lit
up the fine grain of the oak paneling which stood propped
against the wall. On a heap of those soft shavings a rough
gray shepherd-dog had made himself a pleasant bed, and was
lying with his nose between his fore-paws, occasionally wrink-
ling his brows to cast a glance at the tallest of the five work-
men, who was carving a shield in the centre of a wooden man-
telpiece. It was to this workman that the strong barytone be-
longed which was heard above the sound of plane and ham-
mer, singing,

'• Awake my soul, and with the suti
Thy daily stage of duty run ;
Shake off dull sloth . . . ."

Here some measurement was to be taken which required
more coiKcntrated attention, and the sonorous voice subsided

ADAM BEDE.

into a low whistle ; but it presently broke out again with ro
newed vigor,

" Let all thy converse be sincere,
Thy conscience as the noonday clear,"

Such a voice: could only come from a broad chest, and the
broad chest belonged to a large-boned, muscular man, nearly
six feet high, with a back so fiat and a head so well poised
that when he drew himself up to take a more distant survey
of his work he had the air of a soldier standing at ease. The
sleeve rolled up above the elbow showed an arm that was
likely to win the prize for feats of strength ; yet the long,
supple hand, with its broad finger-tips, looked ready for works
of skill. In his tall stalwartness Adam Bede was a Saxon,
and justified his name ; but the jet-black hair, made the more
noticeable by its contrast with the light paper cap, and the
keen glance of the dark eyes that shone from under strongly-
marked, prominent, and mobile eyebrows, indicated a mix-
ture of Celtic blood. The face was large and roughly hewn,
and when in repose had no other beauty than such as belongs
to an expression of good-humored, honest intelligence.

It is clear at a glance that the next workman is Adam's
brother. He is nearly as tall ; he has the same tj^pe of
features, the same hue of hair and complexion ; but the
strength of the family likeness seems only to render more
conspicuous the remarkable difference of expression both in
form and face. Seth's broad shoulders have a slight stoop ;
his eyes are gray ; his eyebrows have less prominence and
more repose than his brother's ; and his glance, instead of
being keen, is confiding and benignant. He has thrown off his
paper cap, and you see that his hair is not thick and straight,
like Adam's, but thin and wavy, allowing you to discern the
exact contour of a coronal arch that predominates very de-
cidedly over the brow.

The idle tramps always felt sure they could get a copper
from Selh ; they scarcely ever spoke to Adam.

The concert of the tools and Adam's voice was at last
broken by Seth, who, lifting the door at which he had been
working intently, placed it against the wall, and said,

" There ! I've finished my door to-day, anyhow."

The workmen all looked up ; Jim Salt, a burly red-haired
man, known as Sandy Jim, paused from his planing, and
Adam said to Seth, with a sharp glance of surprise,

"What ! dost think thee'st finished the door ?"

ADAM BE DE. 7

"Ay, sure," said Seth, with answering surprise, "what's

awanting to't ? " . , , ,

\ loud roar of laughter from the othe'- three workmen
made Seth look round confusedly. Adam did not join m the
laughter, but there was a slight smile on his face as he said,
in a gentler tone than before,

" Why, thee'st forgot the panels." , . • , .

The laughter burst out afresh as Seth clapped his hands
to his head, and colored over brow and crown.

" Hooray ! " shouted a small lithe fellow, called V\ irj'
Ben running forward and seizing the door. " We'll hang up
th' door at fur end o' th' shop an' write on't, ' Seth Bede, the
Methody, his work.' Here, Jim, lend's hould o' th' red-pot.

" Nonsense ! " said Adam. " Let it alone, Ben Cranage
You'll mayhap be making such a slip yourself some day ; you 11
lauo-h o' th' other side o' your mouth then."

^' Catch me at it, Adam. It'll be a good while afore my
head's full o' th' Methodies," said Ben.

" Nay, but it's often full o' drink, and that's worse.

Ben, however, had now got the " red-pot " in his hand, and
was about to begin writing his inscription, making, by way of
preliminary, an imaginary S in the air.

" Let it alone, will you ? " Adam called out, laying down his
tools, striding up to Ben, and seizing his right shoulder.
" Let it alone or I'll shake the soul out o' your body."

Ben shook in Adam's iron grasp, but, like a plucky small
man as he was, he didn't mean to give in. With his left hand
he snatched the brush from his powerless right, and made a
movement as if he would perform the feat of writing with his
left. In a moment Adam turned him round, seized his other
shoulder, and, pushing him along, pinned him against the wall.
But now Seth spoke. .,

" Let be, Addy, let be. Ben will be joking. Why, he si
the ricrht to laugh at me. I canna help laughing at myself. '^^
" I shan't loose him till he promises to let the door alone,

said Adam. . u j '-

" Come, Ben, lad," said Seth, in a persausive tone, don t
let's have a quarrel about it. You know Adam will have his
way. You may's well try to turn a wagon in a narrow lane.
Say you'll leave the door alone, and make an end on't."

"I binna frighted at Adam," said Ben, "but I donna
mind savin' as I'll let't alone at yare askin', Seth."

- Come, that's wise of you, Ben," said Adam, laughing and
relaxing his grasp.

g ADAM BEDE.

They all returned to their work now ; but Wiry Ben, having
had the worst in the bodily contest, was bent on retrieving
that humiliation by a success in sarcasm.

" Which was ye thinkin' on, Seth," he began — " the pretty
parson's face or her sarmunt when ye forgot the panel ? "

" Come and hear her, Ben," said Seth, good-humoredly ;
" she's going to preach on the Green to-night ; happen ye'd
get something to think on yourself then, instead o' those
wicked songs ye're so fond on. Ye might get religion, and
that 'ud be the best day's earnings y' ever made."

" All i' good time for that, Seth ; I'll think about that when
I'm a-going' to settle i' life ; bachelors doesn't want such heavy
earnin's. Happen I shall do the coortin' and the religion both
together 2i.% ye do, Seth ; but ye wouldna ha' me get converted
an' chop in atween ye an' the pretty preacher, an' carry her
aff?"

" No fear o' that, Ben ; she's neither for you nor for me to
win, I doubt. Only you come and hear her, and you won't
speak lightly on her again."

" Well, I'm half a mind t' ha' a look at her to-night, if there
isn't good company at the Holly Bush. What'll she tek for
her text ? Happen ye can tell me, Seth, if so be as I
shouldna come up i' timefor't. Will't be ' What comes ye out
for to see ? A prophetess ? Yea, I say unto you, and more
than a prophetess ' — a uncommon pretty young woman."

"Come, Ben," said Adam, rather sternly, "you let the
words o' the Bible alone ; you're going too far now."

" What ! are yc a-turnin' roun', Adam ? I thought ye war
dead again th' women preachin' a while agoo ? "

" Nay, I'm not turnin' noway. I said naught about the
women preachin' ; I said, You let the Bible alone ; you've got
a jest-book, han't you, as you're rare and proud on ? Keep
your dirty fingers to that."

"Why, y' are gettin' as big a saint as Seth. Y' are
goin' to th' preachin' to-night, I should think. Ye'll do finely
t' lead the singin'. But I dun know what Parson Irwine 'ull
say at's gran' favright Adam Bede a-turnin' Methody."

"Never do you bother yourself about me, Ben. I'm not
a-going to turn Methodist any more nor you are — though it's
like enough you'll turn to something worse. Mester Irwine's
got more sense nor to meddle wi' people's doing as they like in
religion. That's between themselves and God, as he's said to
me many a time."

" Ay, ay ; but he's none so fond o' your dissenters, for all
that."

[ADAM BEDE. 9

" Maybe ; I'm none so fond o' Josh Tod's thick ale, but T
don't hinder you from making a fool o' yourself wi't."

There was a laugh at this thrust of Adam's, but Seth said,
very seriously,

" Nay, nay, Addy, thee mustna say as any body's religion's
like thick ale. Thee dostna believe but what the dissenters
and the Methodists have got the root o' the matter as well as
the church folks."

" Nay, Seth, lad ; I'm not for laughing at no man's relig-
ion. Let 'em follow their consciences, that's all. Only I think
it 'ud be better if their consciences 'ud let 'em stay quiet i' the
church — there's a deal to be learnt there. And there's such a
thing as being over-speritial ; we must have something beside
Gospel i' this world. Look at the canals, an' th' acqueducs,
an' th' coal-pit engines, and Arkwright's mills there at Crom-
ford ; a man must learn summat beside Gospel to make them
things, I reckon. But t' hear some o' them preachers, you'd
think a man must be doing nothing all's life but shutting's
eyes and looking what's a-going on inside him. I know a man
must have the love o' God in his soul, and the Bible's God's
word. But what does the Bible say ? Why, it says as God
put his sperrit into the workman as built the tabernacle, to
make him do all the carved work and things as wanted a nice
hand. And this is my way o' looking at it ; there's the sperrit
o' God in all things and all times — week-day as well as Sun-
day— and i' the great works and inventions, and i' the figur-
ing and the mechanics. And God helps us with our head-pieces
and our hands as well as with our souls ; and if a man does
bits o' jobs out o' working hours — builds a oven for's wife to
save her from going to the bakehouse, or scrats at his bit o'
garden and makes two potatoes grow instead o' one, he's doing
more good, and he's just as near to God, as if he was running
after some preacher and a-praying and a-groaning."

"Well done, Adam !" said Sandy Jim, who had paused
from his planing to shift his planks while Adam was speak-
ing ; "that's the best sarmunt I've beared this long while.
By th' same token, my wife's a-bin a-plaguin' me on to build
her a oven this twelvemont'."

"There's reason in what thee say'st, Adam," observed
Seth, gravely. " But thee know'st thyself as it's hearing the
preachers thee find'st so much fault with as has turned many
an idle fellow into an industrious un. It's the preacher as
empties th' alehouse ; and if a man gets religion he'll do his
work none the worse for that."

lO ADAM BEDE.

** On'v he'll lave the panels out o" th' doors sometimes,
eh, Seth ? " said Wiry Ben.

" Ah, Ben, you've got a joke again me as 'II last you your
life. But it isna religion as was i' fault there ; it was Seth
Bede, as was allays a wool-gathering chap, and religion hasna
cured him, the more's the pity."

" Ne'er heed me, Seth," said Wiry Ben, " y'are a down-
right good-hearted chap, panels or no panels ; an' ye donna
set up your bristles at every bit o' fun, like some o' your kin,
as is mayhap cliverer."

" Seth, lad," said Adam, taking no notice of the sarcasm
against himself, " thee mustna take me unkind. I wasna
driving at thee in what I said just now. Some's got one way
o' looking at things and some's got another."

" Nay, nay, Addy, thee mean'st me no unkindness," said
Seth, "I know that well enough. Thee't like thy dog Gyp —
thee bark'st at me sometimes, but thee allays lick'st my hand
after."

All hands worked on in silence for some minutes, until
the church clock began to strike six. Before the first stroke
had died away, Sandy Jim had loosed his plane and was
reaching his jacket ; Wiry Ben had left a screw half driven
in, and thrown his screw-driver into his tool-basket ; Mum
Taft, who, trye to his name, had kept silence throughout tiie
previous conversation, had flung down his hammer as he was
in the act of lifting it : and Seth, too, had straightened his
back, and was putting out his hand towards his paper cap.
Adam alone had gone on with his work as if nothing had
happened. But observing the cessation of tools he looked
up, and said, in a tone of indignation,

" Look there, now ! I can't abide to see men throwaway
their tools i' that way, the minute the clock begins to strike,
as if they took no pleasure i' their work, and was afraid o'
doing a stroke too much."

Seth looked a little conscious, and began to be slower in
his preparations for going, but Mum Taft broke silence and
said,

" Ay, ay, Adam, lad, ye talk like a young un. When y'
are six an' forty like me, istid o' six an' twenty, ye wonna be
so flush o' workin' for naught."

"Nonsense," said Adam, still wrathful ; "what's age got
to do with it, I wonder ? Ye arena getting stiff yet, I reckon.
I hate to see a man's arms drop down as if he was shot,
before the clock's fairly struck, just as if he'd never a bif

ADAM BEDE. li

o' pride and delight in's work. The very grindstone *ull go
on turning a bit after you loose it."

" Bodderation, Adam ! " exclaimed Wiry Ben. " Lave a
chap aloon, will 'ee. Ye war a-finding fatit wi' preacliers a
while agoo — y' are fond enough o' preachin' yoursen. Ye
may like work better nor play, but I like play better nor work ;
that'll 'commodate ye — it laves ye the moor to do."

With this exit speech, which he considered effective, Wiry
Ben shouldered his basket and left the workshop, quickly
followed by Mum Taft and Sandy Jim. Seth lingered, and
looked wistfully at Adam, as if he expected him to say some-
thing.

" Shalt go home beforfe thee go'st to the preaching ? "
Adam asked, looking up.

"Nay ; I've got my hat and things at Will Maskery's. I
sha'n't be home before going for ten. I'll happen see Dinah
Morris safe home, if she's willing. There's nobody comes
with her from Poyser's, thee know'st."

" Then Til tell mother not to look for thee," said Adam_.
" Thee artna going to Poyser's thyself to-night ? " said
ii.eth, rather timidly, as he turned to leave the workshop.
" Nay, I'm going to th' school."

Hitherto Gvp had kept his comfortable bed, only lifting
up his head and watching Adam more closely as he noticed
the. other workmen departing. But no sooner did Adam put
his ruler in his pocket, and begin to twist his apron round his
waist, than Gyp ran forward and looked up in his master's
face with patient expectation. If Gyp had had a tail he would
doubtless have wagged it ; but, being destitute of that vehicle
for his emotions, he was, like many other worthy personages,
destined to appear more phlegmatic than nature had made
him.

" What, art ready for the basket, eh. Gyp ? " said Adam,
with the" same gentle modulation of voice as when he spoke
to Seth.

Gyp jumped, and gave a short bark, as much as to say,
" Of course." Poor fellow ! he had not a great range of ex-
pression. ^
The basket was the one which on work-days held Adam s
and Seth's dinner ; and no ofUcial, walking in procession,
could look more resolutely unconscious of all acquaintance
than Gyp with his basket trotting at his master's heels.

On leaving the workshop Adam locked the door, took the
key out, and carried it to the house on the other side of the

,2 ADAM BEDE.

wood-yard. It was a low house, with smooth gray thatch and
buff walls, looking pleasant and mellow in the evening light.
The leaded windows were bright and speckless, and the door-
stone was as clean as a white boulder at ebb tide. On the
door-stone stood a clean old woman, in a dark-striped linen
gown, a red kerchief, and a linen cap, talking to some speckled
fowls which appeared to have been drawn toward her by an
illusory expectation of cold potatoes or barley. The old
woman's sight seemed to be dim, for she did not recognize
Adam till he said,

" Here's the key, Dolly ; lay it down for me in the house,
will you ? "

" Ay, sure ; but wunna ye conie in, Adam .' Miss Mary's
i' th' house, and Mester Burge "uU be back anon ; he'd be
glad t' ha' ye to supper wi'm, I'll he's warrand."

" No, Dolly, thank you ; I'm off home. Good-evening."

Adam hastened with long strides. Gyp close to his heels,
out of the work-yard, and along the high road leading away
from the village and down the valley. As he reached the
foot of the slope, an elderly horseman, with his portmanteau
strapped behind him, stopped his horse when Adam had
passed him, and turned round to have another long look at
the stalwart workman in paper cap, leather breeches, and
dark-blue worsted stockings.

Adam, unconscious of the admiration he was exciting,
presently struck across the fields, and now broke out into the
tune which had all day long been running in his head :

" Let all thy converse be sincere.
Thy conscience as the noonday clear ;
For God's all-seein^ eye surveys
Thy secret thoughts, thy works, and ways."

CHAPTER II.

THE PREACHING,

About a quarter of seven there was an unusual appear-
ance of excitement in the village of Hayslope, and through
the whole length of its little street, from the Donnithorn Arms
to the church yard gate, the inhabitants had evidently been

' ADAM BEDE. 13

drawn out of their houses by something more than the pleas-
ure of lounging in the evening sunshine. The Donnithorne
Arms stood at the entrance of the village, and a small farm-
yard and stack-yard which flanked it, indicating that there
was a pretty take of land attached to the inn, gave the travel-
ler a promise of good feed for himself and his horse, which
might well console him for the ignorance in which the weather-
beaten sign left him as to the heraldic bearings of that ancient
family, the Donnithornes. Mr. Casson, the landlord, had
been for some time standing at the door with his hands in
his pockets, balancing himself on his heels and toes, and
looking toward a piece of uninclosed ground, with a maple in
the middle of it, which he knew to be the destination of cer-
tain grave-looking men and women whom he had observed
passing at intervals.

Mr. Casson's person was by no means of that common
type which can be allowed to pass without description. On a
front view it appeared to consist principally of two spheres,
bearing about the same relation to each other as the earth
and moon : that is to say, the lower sphere might be said, at
a rough guess, to be thirteen times larger than the upper,
which naturally performed the function of a mere satellite
and tributary. But here the resemblance ceased, for Mr.
Casson's head was not at all a melancholy looking satellite,
nor was it a " spotty globe," as Milton has irreverently called
the moon ; on the contrary, no head and face look more sleek
and healthy, and its expression, which was chiefly confined to
a pair of round and ruddy cheeks, the slight knot and inter-
ruptions forming the nose and eyes being scarcely worth men-
tion, was one of jolly contentment, only tempered by that
sense of personal dignity which usually made itself felt in his
attitude and bearing. This sense of dignity could hardly be
considered excessive in a man who had been butler to " the
Isarnily " for fifteen years, and who, in his present high posi-
tion, was necessarily very much in contact with his inferiors.
How to reconcile his dignity with the satisfaction of his curi-
osity by walking toward the Green, was the problem that Mr.
Casson had been revolving in his mind for the last five min-
utes ; but when he had partly solved it by taking his hands
•qut of his pockets and thrusting them into the armholes of
his waistcoat, by throwing his head on one side, and providing
himself with an air of contemptuous indifference to whatever
might fall under his notice, his thoughts were diverted by the
approach of the horseman, whom we lately saw pausing tp

ADAM BEDE.

have another look at our friend Adam, and who now pulled
up at the door of the Donnithorne Arms.

" Take off the bridle and give him a drink, ostler," said
the traveller to the lad in a smock frock, who had come out
of the yard ai the sound of the horse's hoofs.

" Why, what's up in your pretty village, landlord ? " he
continued, getting down. "There seems to be quite a stir.''

" It's a Methodis' preaching, sir ; it's been gev hout as a
young woman's a-going to preach on the Green," answered
Mr. Casson, in a treble and wheezy voice, with a slightly
mincing accent. " Will you please to step in, sir, an' tek
somethink ? "

" No ; I must be getting on to Drosseter. I only want a
drink for my horse. And what does your parson say, I won-
der, io a young woman preaching just under his nose ? "

" Parson Irwine, sir, doesn't live here ; he lives at Brox'on,
over the hill there. The parsonage here's a tumble-down place,
sir, not fit for gentry to live in. He comes here to preach
of a Sunday afternoon, sir, an' puts up his boss here. It's a
gray cob, sir, an' he sets great store by't. He's allays puts
up his boss here, sir, iver since before I bed the Donnithorne
Arms. I'm not this countryman, you may tell by my tongue,
sir. They're cur'ous talkers i' this country, sir; the gentry's
hard work to hunderstand 'em. I was brought hup among
the gentry, sir, an' got the turn o' their tongue when I was a
bye. Why, what do you think the folks here say for ' hevn't
you.''' — the gentry, you know, says 'hevn't you' — well, the
people about here sa3s ' hanna yey.' It's what they call the
dileck as is spoke hereabout, sir. That's what I've heard
Squire Donnithorne say many a time ; it's the dileck, says
he."

" Ay, a}'," said the stranger, smiling. " I know it very
well. But you've not got many Methodists about here, surely
— in this agricultural spot. I should have thought there
would hardly be such a thing as a Methodist to be found
about here. You're all farmers, aren't you ? The Methodists
can seldom lay much hold on ihefti.'^

" Why, sir, there's a pretty lot o' workmen round about,
sir. There's Mester Burge as owns the timber-yard over
there, he underteks a good bit o' building an' repairs. An'
there's the stone-pits not far off. There's plenty of emply i'
this country side, sir. An' there's a fine batch o' Methodisses
at Treddles'on — that's the market-town, about three miles
off — you'll maybe ha' come through it, sir. There's pretty

ADAM BEDE.

nigh a score of 'em on the Green now, as come from there.
That's where our people gets it from, though there's only two
men of 'em in all Hayslope : that's Will Maskery, the wheel-
wright, and Seth Bede, a young man as works at the car-
penterin"."

"The preacher comes from Treddleston, then, does she ? "

*' Nay, sir, she comes out o' Stonyshire, pretty nigh thirty
mile off. But she's a-visitin' hereabout at Mester Peyser's at
the Hall Farm — it's them barns an' big walnut-trees, right
away to the left, sir. She's own niece to Poyser's wife, an'
they'll be fine an' vexed at her for making a fool of herself
i' that way. But I've beared as there's no holding these
Methodisses when the maggit's once got i' their head; many
of 'em goes stark starin' mad wi' their religion. Though this
young woman's quiet enough to look at, by what T can make
out ; I've not seen her myself."

" Well, I wish I had time to wait and see her, but I must
get on. I've been out of my way for the last twenty minutes,
to have a look at that place in the valley. It's Squire Donni-
thorne's, I suppose ? "

" Yes, sir, that's Donnithorne Chase, that is. Fine hoaks
there, isn't there, sir.? I should know what it is, sir, for I've
lived butler there a-going i' fifteen year. It's Captain Donni-
thorne as is th' heir, sir — Squire Donnithorne's grandson.
He'll be comin' of hage this 'ay-'arvest, sir, an' we shall hev
fine doin's. He owns all the land about here, sir. Squire
Donnithorne does."

"Well, it's a pretty spot, whoever may own it," said the
traveller, mounting his horse ; " and one meets some fine
strapping fellows about too. I met as fine a young fellow as
ever I saw in my life, about half an hour ago, before I came
up the hill — a carpenter, a tall, broad-shouldered fellow with
black hair and black eyes, marching along like a soldier. We
want such fellows as he to lick the French."

" Ay, sir, that's Adam Bede, that is, I'll be bound — Thias
Bede's son — everybody knows him hereabout. He's an un-
common clever stiddy fellow, an' wonderful strong. Lord
bless you, sir — if you'll hexcuse me for saying so — he can
walk forty mile a day, an' lift a matter o' sixty ston'. He's
an uncommon favorite wi' the gentry, sir ; Captain Donni-
thorne and Parson Irwine meks a fine fuss wi' him. But he's
a little lifted up an' peppery like."

" Well, good-evening to you, landlord ; I must go on."

" Your servant,. sir ; good-evenin'."

r6 ADAM BEDE.

The traveller put his horse into a quick walk up the vil-
lage, but when he approached the Green, the beauty of the
view that lay on his right hand, the singular contrast pre-
sented by the groups of villagers with the knot of Methodists
near the maple, and, perhaps yet more, curiosity to see the
young female preacher, proved too much for his anxiety to
get to the end of his journey, and he paused.

The Green lay at the extremity of the village, and from it
the road branched off in two directions, one leading farther
up the hill by the church, and the other winding gently down
toward the valley. On the side of the Green that led toward
the church the broken line of thatched cottages was con-
tinued nearly to the church-yard gate ; but on the opposite,
north-western side, there was nothing to obstruct the view of
gently-swelling meadow, and wooded valley, and dark masses
of distant hill. That rich undulating district of Loamshire to
which Hayslope belonged lies close to a grim outskirt of
Stonyshire, overlooked by its barren hills, as a pretty bloom-
ing sister may sometimes be seen linked in the arm of a
rugged, tall, swarthy brother; and in two or three hours'
ride the traveller might exchange a bleak, treeless region, in-
tersected by lines of cold gray stone, for one where his road
wound under the shelter of woods, or upswelling hills, muffled
with hedgerows and long meadow-grass and thick corn ; and
where at every turn he came upon some fine old country-seat
nestled in the valley or crowning the slope, some homestead
with its long length of barn and its cluster of golden ricks,
some gray steeple looking out from a pretty confusion of
trees and thatch and dark-red tiles. It was just such a
picture as this last that Hayslope church had made to the
traveller as he began to mount the gentle slope leading to its
pleasant uplands, and now from his station near the Green
he had before him in one view nearly all the other typical
features of this pleasant land. High up against the horizon
were the huge conical masses of hill, like giant mounds in-
tended to fortify this region of corn and grass against the
keen and hungry winds of the north ; not distant enough to
be clothed in purple mystery, but with sombre greenish sides
visibly specked with sheep, whose motion was only revealed
by memory, not detected by sight ; wooed from day to day
by the changing hours, but responding with no change in
themselves — left forever grim and sullen after the flush of
morning, the winged gleams of the April noonday, the part-
ing crimson glory of the ripening summer sun. And directly

AnA^/ BEDK. I?

u 1 .t,«n, tl.^ Pve rested on a more advanced line of hang-

but the swelling slope of meadow would ""^'f^^"^" j'";f^ fj

the femlocks lining the bushy hedgerows. 1' --that
moment in summer when *e sound of the sc the be. g
whetted makes us cast more lingering looks at the no
sprinkled tresses of the meadows. landscape if he

;d^.^^^:nsi»:^

Jonathan Barge's pasture ^^ ^X S^ a m but%Wa^^

iorn-fields -^^/^te^^inTeTesf fof himt '^^^^ gf ps

"f^^^ '^''h Jcl Xlrl^^S^<^o^ m the village was there,
close at hand ll.^erysene ^sox%\td. night-cap,

from " old Feyther Taft n h s Dro^v ^^

who was bent nearly ^oubje ^u tseerned toug ^^^^^^ g^.^^^

keep on his legs a ^°"g . J^^^^^^j^^^^^^^^ lolling for-

down to the babies with their little rou
ward in quilted linen caps, ^^ow af Aen he^^^^^ ^^.^

arrival ; perhaps a slouchmg abore^^^ who, ^^^^^^ g^.^^^ ^ ^^^^

Sr ll^'^uUt rare^nrtoTin the Mfthodists on
Si^GrTen. and identify themselves in t at -ywiU^^h^^ejc
pectant audience, for there was not one ottne ^^^^

Lt have disclai^ned the imputation of ^a-' ^ J^^, ,, ^ee
hear the " Preacher-woman -^hey had on y ^^^^^^^^

- what war a-goin on, like. , ,^ ^^^ ""^.""^^ ,j^op But do not
in the neighborhood of the blacksmhsh^^^^^^^^^^

imagine them gathered in a kno^ ViU^ e ^ ne^^^ ^l^^.t as
whisper is unknown among them, and tney

1 8 ADAM BEDE.

incapable of an undertone as a cow or a stag. Your true
rustic turns his back on liis interlocutor, throwing a question
over his shoulder as if he meant to run away from the answer,
and walking a step or two farther ofif when the interest of the
dialogue culminates. So the group in the vicinity of the
blacksmith's door was by no means a close one, and formed
no screen in front of Chad Cranage, the blacksmith, himself,
who stood with his black brawny arms folded, leaning against
the door-post, and occasionally sending forth a bellowing
laugh at his own jokes, giving them a marked preference
over the sarcasms of Wiry Ben, who had renounced the
pleasures of the Holly Bush for the sake of seeing life under
a new form. But both styles of wit were treated with equal
contempt by Mr. Joshua Rann. Mr. Rann's leathern apron
and subdued griminess can leave no one in any doubt that
he is the village shoemaker ; the thrusting out of his chin and
stomach, and the twirling of his thumbs, are more subtle in-
dications, intended to prepare unwary strangers for the dis-
covery that they are in the presence of the parish clerk.
"Old Joshway," as he is irreverently called by his neighbors,
is in a state of simmering indignation ; but he has not yet
opened his lips except to say, in a resounding bass under-
tone, like the tuning of a violoncello, " Sehon, King of the
Amorites : for His mercy endureth forever ; and Og, the
King of Basan : for His mercy endureth forever " — a quota-
tion which may seem to have slight bearing on the present
occasion, but, as with every other anomaly, adequate knowl-
edge will show it to be a natural sequence. Mr. Rann was
inwardly maintaining the dignity of the Church in the face of
this scandalous irruption of Methodism ; and, as that dignity
was bound up with his own sonorous utterance of the re-
sponses, his argument naturally suggested a quotation from
the psalm he had read the last Sunday afternoon.

The stronger curiosity of the woinen had drawn them quite
to the edge of the Green, where they could examine more
closely the Quaker-like costume and odd deportment of the
female Methodists. Underneath the maple there was a small
cart which had been brought from the wheelwright's to serve
as a pulpit, and round this a couple of benches and a few
chairs had been placed. Some of the Methodists were rest-
ing on these, with their eyes closed, as if rapt in prayer or
meditation. Others chose to continue standing with a look
of melancholy compassion, which was highly amusing to Bessy
Cranage, the blacksmith's buxom daughter, known to her

ADAM BEDE. 19

neighbors as Chad's Bess, who wondered " why the folks war
a-nfekin faces a that'ns." Chad's Bess was the object of pecu-
liar compassion, because her hair, being turned back under a
cap which was set at the top of her head, exposed to view an
ornament of which she was much prouaer than of her red
cheeks, namely, a pair of large round earrings with false gar-
nets in them, ornaments contemned not only by the ^Metho-
dists' but by her own cousin and namesake, Timothy s Bess,
who with much cousinly feeling, often wished"them earrings

mieht come to good. n 4.- «

Timothy's Bess, though retaining her maiden appe lation
among her famiUars, had long been the wife of bandy Jim
and possessed a handsome set of matronly jewels, ot which
it is enough to mention the heavy baby she was rocking in her
arms and the sturdy fellow of five in knee-breeches and red
leers who had a rusty milk-can round his neck by way of di-um,
an'd'was very carefully avoided by Chad's small terrier. This
vouno- olive-branch, notorious under the name of limot'iy s
Bess's Ben, being of an inquiring disposition, unchecked by
any false modesty, had advanced beyond the group of women
and children, and was walking round the Methodists, looking
up in their faces with his mouth wide open, and beating his
stick a<rainst the milk-can by way of musical accompaniment.
But one of the elderly women bending down to take him by
the shoulder, with an air of grave remonstrance, Timothy s
Bess's Ben first kicked out vigorously, then took to his heels,
and sought refuge behind his father's legs.

" Ye gallows young dog," said Sandy Jim, with some pater-
nal pride, " if ye dunna keep that stick quiet, I'll tek it from
ye. What d'ye mane by kickin' foulks ? "

" Here ' ""ie'm here to me, Jim," said Chad Cranage ; 1 U
tie 'm up an' shoe 'm as I do the bosses. Well, Mester Cas-
son," he continued, as that personage sauntered up toward
the group of men, " how are ye t'-naight ? Are ye coom t
help groon ? The' say folks allays groon when they re hark-
enin' to the Methodys, as if the' war bad i' th' inside. I mane
to groon as loud as your cow did th' other naight, an then
the praicher 'ull think I'm i' th' raight way." ^^

" I'd advise you not to be up to no nonsense, Chad, said
Mr. Casson, with some dignity ; " Poyser wouldn't like to heal
as his wife's niece was treated any ways disrespectful, for all
he mayn't be fond of her taking on herself to preach."

"Ay, an' she's a pleasant-looked 'un too," said Wiry Ben.
"I'll stick up for the pretty women preachin' ; I know they'd

20 ADAM BEDE.

persuade me over a deal sooner nor th' ugly men. I shouldna
wonder if I turn Methody afore the night's out, an' begin to
coort the preacher like Seth Bede."

" Why, Seth's lookin' rether too high, I should think," said
Mr. Casson. " This woman's kin wouldn't like her to demean
herself to a common carpenter ! "

" Tchu ! " said Ben, with a long treble intonation, " what's
folks's kin got to do wi't? Not a chip. Poyser's wife may
turn her nose up an' forget by-gones, but this Diiia Morris,
the't°ll me, 's as poor as iver she was — works at a mill, an's
much ado to keep hersen. A strappin' young carpenter as is
a ready-made Methody, like Seth, wouldna be a bad match
for her. Why, Poysers make as big a fuss wi' Adam Bede as
if he war a nevvy o' their own."

" Idle talk ! idle talk ! " said Mr. Joshua Rann, " Adam
an' Seth's two men ; you wunna fit them two wi' the same
last."

" Maybe," said Wiry Ben, contemptuously, "but Seth's
the lad for me, though he war a Methody twice o'er. I'm fair
beat wi' Seth, for I've been teazin' him iver sin' we've been
workin' together, an' he bears me no more malice nor a lamb.
An' he's a stout-hearted feller too, for when we saw the old
tree all afire, a-comin' across the fields one night, an' we
thought as it were a boguy, Seih made no more ado, but he
up to't as bold as a constable. Why, there he comes out o'
Will Maskery's ; there's Will hisself, lookin' as meek as if he
couldna knock a nail o' th' head for fear o' hurtin' 't. An'
there's the pretty preacher-woman ! My eye, she's got her
bonnet off. I mun go a bit nearer."

Several of the men followed Ben's lead, and the traveller
pushed his horse on to the Green, as Dinah walked rather
quickly, and in advance of her companions, toward the cart
under the maple-tree. While she was near Seth's tall figure
she looked short, but when she had mounted the cart, and
was away from all comparison, she seemed above the middle
height of woman, though in reality she did not exceed it — an
effect which was due to the slimness of her figure, and the
simple line of her black stuff dress. The stranger was struck,
with surprise as he saw her approach and mount the cart —
surprise, not so much at the feminine delicacy of her appear-
ance, as at the total absence of self-consciousness in her de-
meanor. He had made up his mind to see her advance with
a measured step, and a demure solemnity of countenance ;
he, had felt sure that her face would be mantled with a smile

ADAM BEDE il

Of conseious saintship, or else charged with denunciatory
bitterness He knew but two types of Methodist-the ec
static and the bilious. But Dinah walked as simply as if she
were going to market, and seemed as unconscious of her out-
ward appearance as a little boy ; there was no blush, no tremu-
lousness, which said, " I know you think me a pretty woman
oo voun- to preach ;" no casting up or down of the eyelids,
no compression of the lips, no attitude of the^V^f' ^^at said
•' But you must think of me as a saint." She held no book
in her ungloved hands, but let them hang down light y crossed
before he?, as she stood and turned her gray eyes on the people
There was no keenness in the eyes ; they seemed rather o be
shedding love than making observations , they had the liquid
look that tells that the mind is full o what it has to give out
rather than impressed by external objects. She stood with
her left hand toward the descending sun ; and leafy boughs
screened her from its rays ; but in this sober light the delicate
colorin^^ of her face seemed to gather a calm vividness, like
flowers°at evening. It was a small oval face, of a uniform trans-
parent whiteness, with an egg-like line of cheek and chin, a full
but firm mouth, a delicate nostril, and a low perpendicular brow.
surmounted by a rising arch of parting, between smooth locks
of pale reddish hair. The hair was drawn straight back behind
the ears, and covered, except for an inch or two above the
brow, by a net Quaker cap. The eyebrows, of the same color
as the hair, were perfectly horizontal and firmly penciled ; the
eyelashes, though no darker, were long and abundant ; notli-
in- was left blurred or unfinished. It was one of those faces
thlt make one think of white flowers with light touches of
color on their pure petals. The eyes had no peculiar beauty
beyond that of expression ; they looked so simple, so candid
so gravely loving, that no accusing scowl, no light sneer, could
help melting away before their glance. Joshua Rann gave a
long cough, as if he were clearing his throat in order to come
to a new understanding with himself ; Chad Cranage lifted up
his leather skull-cap and scratched his head ; and Wiry ben
wondered how Seth had the pluck to think of courting her

" A sweet woman," the stranger said to^ himself, but
surely Nature never meant her for a preacher."

Perhaps he was one of those who think that Nature has
theatrical properties, and, with the considerate view of faci ita-
ting art and psychology, " makes up " her characters so that
there may be no mistake about them. But Dinah began to
speak.

g2 ADAM BEDE.

" Dear friends." she said, in a clear but not loud voice.
" let us pray for a blessing."

She closed her eyes, and, hanging her head down a little,
continued in the same moderate tone, as if speaking to some
one quite near her :

" Saviour of sinners ! when a poor woman, laden with sins,
went out to the well to draw water, she found Thee sitting at
the well. She knew Thee not ; she had not sought Thee ; her
mind was dark ; her life was unholy. But Thou didst speak
to her, Thou didst teach her, Thou didst show her that her
life lay open before Thee, and yet Thou wast ready to give
her that blessing which she had never sought. Jesus ! Thou
art in the midst of us, and Thou knowest all men : if there is
any here like that poor woman — if their minds are dark, their
lives unholy, if they have come out not seeking Thee, not de-
siring to be taught, deal with them according to the free mercy
which Thou didst show to her. Speak to them, Lord ; open their
ears to my message ; bring their sins to their minds, and make
them thirst for that salvation which Thou art ready to give.

" Lord ! Thou art with Thy people still : they see Thee
in the night watches, and their hearts burn within them as
Thou talkest with them by the way. And Thou art near to
those who have not known Thee : open their eyes that they
may see Thee — see Thee weeping over them, and saying, ' Ye
will not come unto me that ye might have life — see Thee
hanging on the cross and saying, ' Father, forgive them, for
they know not what they do ' — see Thee as Thou wilt come
again in Thy glory to judge them at the last. Amen."

Dinah opened her eyes again and paused, looking at the
group of villagers, who were now gathered rather more
closely on her right hand.

" Dear friends," she began, raising her voice a little, "you
have all of you been to church, and I think you must have
heard the clergyman read these words : ' The spirit of the
Lord is upon me^ because he hath anointed me to preach the
gospel to the poor.' Jesus Christ spoke those words — he
said he came to preach the Gospel to the poor : I don't know
whether you ever thought about those words much ; but I will
tell you when I remember first hearing them. It was on just
such a sort of evening as this, when I was a little girl, and my
aunt, as brouglit me up, took me to hear a good man preach
out of doors, just as we are here. I remember his face well :
he was a very old man, and had very long white hair ; his
voice was very soft and beautiful, not like any voice I had

ADAM BE BE.

ever heard before. I was a little girl, and scarcely knew any-
thing, and this old man seemed to me such a different sort of
a man from any body 1 had ever seen before, that I thought
he had perhaps come down from the sky to preach to us, and
I said, ' Aunt, will he go back to the sky to-night, like the
picture in the Bible ? '

" That man of God was ]Mr. Wesley, who spent his life in
doing what our blessed Lord did — preaching the Gospel to
the poor — and he entered into his rest eight years ago. I
came to know more about him years after, but I was a foolish,
thoughtless child then, and I remembered only one thing he
told us in his sermon. He told us as ' Gospel ' meant ' good
news.' The Gospel, you know, is what the Bible tells us
about God.

" Think of that, now ! Jesus Christ did really come down
from heaven, as I, like a silly child, thought Mr. Wesley did ;
and what he came down for, was to tell good news about God
to the poor. Why, you and me, dear friends, are poor. We
have been brought up in poor cottages, and have been
reared on oat-cake and lived coarse ; and we haven't been to
school much, nor read books, and we don't know much about
anything but what happens just round us. We are just the
sort of people that want to hear good news. For when any
body's well off, they don't much mind about hearing news from
distant parts ; but if a poor man or woman's in trouble, and
has hard work to make out a living, he likes to have a letter
to tell him he's got a friend as will help him: To be sure we
can't help knowing something about God, even if we've never
heard the Gospel, the good news that our Saviour brought us.
For we know everything comes from God : don't you. say
almost ever}' day, ' This and that will happen, please God .'' '
and ' We shall begin to cut the grass soon, please God to send
us a little more sunshine ? ' We know verj^ well we are alto-
gether in the hands of God : we didn't bring ourselves into
the world, we can't keep ourselves alive w hile we're sleeping ;
the daylight, and the wind, and the corn, and the cows to
give us milk — everything we have comes from God. And
he gave us our souls, and put love between parents and chil-
dren, and husband and wife. But is that as niuch as we want
to know about God .-" We see he is great and mighty, and
can do what he will ; we are lost as if we were struggling in
great waters, when we try to think of him,

" But perhaps doubts come in^o your mind like this : Can
God take much notice of us poor people ? Perhaps he only

ADAM BEDS.

made the world for the great, and the wise, and the rich. It
doesn't cost him much to give us our little handful of victual
and bit of clothing ; but how do we know he cares for us
any more than we care for the worms and things in the garden,
so as we rear our carrots and onions ? Will God take care
of us when we die ? and has he any comfort for us when we
are lame, and sick, and helpless ? Perhaps, too, he is angry
with us ; else why does the blight come, and the bad harvest,
and the fever, and all sorts of pain and trouble ? For our
life is full of trouble, and if God sends us good, he seems to
send bad too. How is it ? how is it ?

" Ah ! dear friends, we are in sad want of good news about
God ; and what does other good news signify if we haven't
that ? For everything else comes to an end, and when we
die we leave it all. But God lasts when everything else is
gone. What shall we do if he is not our friend ?"

Then Dinah told how the good news had been brought,
and how the mind of God towards the poor had been made
manifest in the life of Jesus, dwelling on its lowliness and its
acts of mercy.

" So you see, dear friends," she went on, "Jesus spent his
time almost all in doing good to poor people ; he preached
out of doors to them, and he made friends of poor workmen,
and taught them and took pains with them. Not but what
he did good to the rich too, for he was full of love to all men,
only he saw as the poor were more in want of his help. So
he cured the lame', and the sick, and the blind, and he worked
miracles to feed the hungry, because, he said, he was sorry
for them ; and he was very kind to the little children, and
comforted those who had lost their friends ; and he spoke
very tenderly to poor sinners that were sorry for their sins.

" Ah ! wouldn't you love such a man if you saw him — if
he was here in this village ? What a kind heart he must
have! What a friend he would be to go to in trouble ! How
pleasant it must be to be taught by him !

" Well, dear friends, who was this man ? Was he only a
good man — a very good man, and no more — like our dear
Mr. Wesley, who has been taken from us ? . . . . He was the
Son of God — ' in the image of the Father,' the Bible says ;
that means, just like God, who is the beginning and end of
all things — the God we want to know about. So then, all the
love that Jesus showed to the poor is the same love that God
has for us. We cao understand what Jesus felt, because he
came in a body like ours, and spoke words such as we speak

ADAM BEDE. 25

to each other. We were afraid to think what God was before
—the God who made the world, and the sky, and the thunder
and lightning. We could never see him ; we could only see
the things he had made ; and some of these things was very
terrible, so as v>e might well tremble when we thought of him.
But our blessed Saviour has showed us what God is m a way
us poor ignorant people can understand ; he has showed us
what God's heart is, what are his feelings toward us.

" But let us see a little more about what Jesus came on
earth for. Another time he said, ' I came to seek and to save
that which was lost ;' and another time,^' I came not to call
the righteous, but sinners to repentance.'

" The lost ! . . . Sinners ./ . . . Ah ! dear friends, does
that mean you and me ? "

Hitherto the traveller had been chained to the spot against
his will by the charm of Dinah's mellow treble tones, which
had a variety of modulation like that of a fine instrument
touched with the unconscious skill of musical instinct. The
simple things she said seemed like novelties, as a melody
strikes us with a new feeling when we hear it sung by the
pure voice of a boyish chorister; the quiet depth of conviction
with which she spoke seemed in itself an evidence for the
truth of her message. He saw that she had thoroughly ar-
rested her hearers. The villagers had pressed nearer to her,
and there was no longer anything but grave attention on all
faces. She spoke slowly, though quite fluently, often pausing
after a question, or before any transition of ideas. There
was no change of attitude, no gesture ; the effect of her speech
was produced entirely by the inflections of her voice ; and
when she came to the question, " Will God take care of us
when we die ? " she uttered it in such a tone of plaintive ap-
peal that the tears came into some of the hardest eyes. The
stran<^er had ceased to doubt, as he had done at the first
glance, that she could fix the attention of her rougher hearers,
but still he wondered whether she could have that power of
rousing their more violent emotions, which must surely be a
necessary seal of her vocation as a Methodist preacher, until
she came to the words, " Lost ! Sinners ! " when there was a
great change in her voice and manner. She had made a long
pause before the exclamation, and the pause seemed to be
filled by agitating thoughts that showed themselves in her
features. Her pale face became paler ; the circles under her
eyes deepened, as they do when tears half gather vvithoutfall
ing ; and the mild, loving eyes took an expression of appalled

26 ADAM BEDS.

pity, as if she had suddenly discerned a destroying angel
hovering over the heads of the people. Her voice became
deep and muffled, but there was still no gesture. Nothing
could be less like the ordinary type of the ranter than Dinah.
She was not preaching as she heard others preach, but speak-
ing directly from her own emotions, and under the inspiration
of her own simple faith.

But now she had entered into a new current of feeling.
Her manner became less calm, her utterance more rapid and
agitated, as she tried to bring home to the people their guilt
their wilful darkness, their state of disobedience to God — as
she dwelt on the hatefulness of sin, the Divine holiness, and
the sufferings of the Saviour by which a way had been opened
for their salvation. At last it seemed as if, in her yearning
desire to reclaim the lost sheep, she could not be satisfied by
addressing her hearers as a body. She appealed first to one
and then to another, beseeching them with tears to turn to
God while there was yet time ; painting to them the desolation
of their souls, lost in sin, feeding on the husks of this miser-
able world, far away from God their Father ; and then the
love of the Saviour, who was waiting and watching for their
return.

There was many a responsive sigh and groan from her
fellow-Methodists, but the village mind does not easily take
fire, and a little smouldering, vague anxiety, that might easily
die out again, was the utmost effect Dinah's preaching had
wrought in them at present. Yet no one had retired, except
the children and "old Feyther Taft," who, being too deaf to
catch many words, had some time ago gone back to his ingle-
nook. Wiry Ben was feeling very uncomfortable, and almost
wishing he had not come to hear Dinah ; he thought what she
said would haunt him somehow. Yet he couldn't help liking to
look at her and listen to her, though he dreaded every moment
that she would fix her eyes on him, and address him in partic-
ular. She had already addressed Sandy Jim, who was now
holding the baby to relieve his wife, and the big soft-hearted
man had rubbed away some tears with his fist, with a confused
intention of being a better fellow, going less to the Holly
Bush down by the Stone Pits, and cleaning himself more reg-
ularly of a Sunday.

In front of Sandy Jim stood Chad's Bess, who had shown
an unwonted quietude and fixity of attention ever since Dinah
had begun to speak. Not that 'the matter of the discourse had
arrested her at once, for she was lost in a puzzling speculation

ADAM BEDE.

as to what pleasure and satisfaction there could be in life to
a young woman who wore a cap like Dinah's. Giving up this
inquiry in despair, she took to studying Dinah's nose, eyes,
mouth, and hair, and wondering whether it was better to have
such a sort of pale face as that, or fat red cheeks and round
black eyes like her own. But gradually the influence of the
general gravity told upon her, and she became conscious of
what Dinah was saying. The gentle tones, the loving persua-
sion, did not touch her, but when the more severe appeals came
she began to be frightened. Poor Bessy had always been con-
sidered a naughty girl ; she was conscious of it ; if it was nec-
essary to be very good, it was clear she must be in a bad way.
She couldn't find her places at church as Sally Rann could,
she had often been tittering when she " curcheyed " to Mr.
Irwine, and these religious deficiencies were accompanied by
a corresponding slackness in the minor morals, for Bessy be-
longed unquestionably to that unsoaped, lazy class of feminine
characters with whom you may venture to eat " an egg, an
apple, or a nut." All this she was generally conscious of, and
hitherto had not been greatly ashamed of it. But now she
began to feel very much as if the constable had come to take
her up and carry her before the justice for some undefined
offence. She had a terrified sense that God, whom she had
always thought of as very far off, was very near to her, and
that Jesus was close by looking at her, though she could not
see him. For Dinah had that belief in visible manifestations
of Jesus, which is common among the Methodists, and she
communicated it irresistibly to her hearers ; she made them
feel that he was among them bodily, and might at any mo-
ment show himself to them in some way that would strike an-
guish and penitence into their hearts.

'• See ! " she exclaimed, turning to the left, with her eyes
fixed on a point above the heads of the people, " see where
our blessed Lord stands and weeps, and stretches out his arms
toward you. Hear what he says : ' How often would I have
gathered you as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings,
and ye would not ! ' . . o . and ye would not ! " she repeated,
in a tone of pleading reproach, turning her eyes on the people
again. " See the print of the nails on his dear hands and
feet. It is your sins that made them ! Ah ! how pale and
worn he looks ! He has gone through all that great agony in
the garden, when his soul was exceeding sorrowful even unto
death and the great drops of sweat fell like blood to the ground.
They spat upon him and buffeted him, they scourged him, they

jg ADAM BEDE.

mocked him, they laid the heavy cross on his bruised shoulders.
Then they nailed him up ! Ah ! what pain ! His lips are
parched with thirst, and they mocked him still in his great
agony ; yet with those parched lips he prays for them,
' Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.' Then
a horror of great darkness fell upon him, and he felt what
sinners feel when they are forever shut out from God. That
was the last drop in the cup of bitterness. ' My God, my God ! '
he cries, ' why hast Thou forsaken me ?

" All this he bore for you ! For you — and you never think
of him ; for you — and you turn your backs on him ; you don't
care what he has gone through for you. Yet he is not weary
of toiling for you ; he has risen from the dead, he is praying
for you at the right hand of God — ' Father, forgive them, for
they know not what they do.' And he is upon this earth too ;
he is among us ; he is there close to you now ; I see his
wounded body and his look of love."

Here Dinah turned to Bessy Cranage, whose bonny youth
and evident vanity had touched her with pity.

" Poor child ! poor child ! He is beseeching you, and you
don't listen to him.- You think of earrings, and fine gowns and
caps, and you never think of the Saviour who died to save your
precious soul. Your cheeks will be shrivelled one day, your
hair will be gray, your poor body will be thin and tottering !
Then you will. begin to feel that your soul is not saved ; then
you will have to stand before God dressed in your sins, in your
evil tempers and vain thoughts. And Jesus, who stands ready
to help you now, won't help you then ; because you won't have
him to be your Saviour, he will be your judge. Now he looks
at you with love and mercy, and says, ' Come to me that you
may have life ;' then he will turn away from you and say, ' De-
part from me into everlasting fire ! ' "

Poor Bessy's v/ide-open black eyes began to fill with tears,
her great red cheeks and lips became quite pale, and her face
was distorted like a little child's before a burst of crying.

" Ah ! poor blind child ! " Dinah went on, " think if it
should happen to you as it once happened to a servant of God
in the days of her vanity. .5"//^ thought of her lace caps, and
saved all her money to buy 'em ; she thought nothing about
how she might get a clean heart and a right spirit, she only
wanted to have better lace than other girls. And one day
when she put her new cap on and looked in the glass, she saw
a bleeding Face crowned with thorns. That face is looking
at you now," — here Dinah pointed to a spot close in front oi

ADAM BEDE. 29

Bessy—" Ah ! tear off those foUies ! cast them away from you,
as if they where stinging adders. They are stinging you— they
are poisoning your soul — they are dragging you down into a
dark bottomless pit, where you will sink forever, and forever,
and forever, further away from light and God."

Bessy could bear it no longer ; a great terror was upon her,
and, wrenching her earrings from her ears, she threw them
down before her, sobbing aloud. Her father, Chad, frightened
lest he should be "laid hold on" too, this impression on the
rebellious Bess striking him as nothing less than a miracle,
walked hastily away and began to work at his anvil by way
of reassuring himself. "Folks mun ha' boss-shoes, praichin
or no praichin i the devil cauna lay hould o' me for that," he
muttered to himself.

But now Dimchbegan to tell of the joys that were in store
for the penitent, and to describe in her simple way the divine
peace and love with which the soul of the believer is filled —
how the sense of God's love turns poverty into riches, and
satisfies the soul, so that no uneasy desire vexes it, no fear
alarms it ; how, at last, the very temptation to sin is extin-
guished, and heaven is begun upon earth, because no cloud
passes between the soul and God, who is its eternal sun.

" Dear friends," she said at last, " brothers and sisters,
whom I love as those for whom my Lord has died, believe me
I know what this great blessedness is ; and because I know it,
I want you to have it too. I am poor, like you ; I have to get
my living with my hands ; but no lord nor lady can be so hap-
py as me, if they haven't got the love of God in their souls.
Think what it is — not to hate anything but sin ; to be full of
love to every creature ; to be frightened at nothing ; to be sure
that all things will turn to good ; not to mind pain, because it
is our Father's will ; to know that nothing — no, not if the earth
was to be burnt up, or the waters come and drown us — noth-
ing could part us from God who loves us, and who fills our
souls with peace and joy, because we are sure that whatever
he wills is holy, just, and good.

" Dear friends, come and take this blessedness ; it is offered
to you ; it is the good news that Jesus came to preach to the
poor. It is not like the riches of this world, so that the more
one gets the less the rest can have. God is without end ; his
love is without end —

" ' Its streams the whole creation reach,
So plenteous is the store ;
Enough for all, enough for each^
Enough for evermore,' '*

t(j ADAM BEDS.

Dinah had been speaking at least an hour, and the redden-
ing light of the parting day seemed to give a solemn emphasis
to her closing words. The stranger, who had been interested
in the course of her sermon, as if it had been thedevelopmenl
of a drama — for there is this sort of fascination in all sincere
unpremeditated eloquence, which opens to one the inward
drama of the speaker's emotions — now turned his horse aside
ana pursued his way, while Dinah said, " Let us sing a little,
dear friends ; " and as he was still winding down the slope,
the voices of the Methodists reached him, rising and falling in
that strange blending of exultation and sadness which belongs
to the cadence of a hymn.

CHAPTER III.

AFTER THE PREACHING.

In less than an hour from that time Seth Bede was walk-
ing by Dinah's side along the hedgerow-path that skirted the
pastures and green cornfields which lay between the village
and the Hall Farm. Dinah had taken ofT her little Quaker
bonnet again, and was holding it in her hands that slie might
have a freer enjoyment of the cool evening twilight, and Seth
could see the expression of her face quite clearly as he walked
by her side, timidly revolving something he wanted to say to
her. It was an expression of unconscious placid gravity — of
absorption in thoughts that had no connection with the pres-
ent moment or with her own personality : an expression that
is most of all discouraging to a lover. Her very walk was dis-
couraging : it had that quiet elasticity that asks for no support.
Seth felt this dimly ; lie said to himself, " She's too good and
holy for any mar, let alone me," and the words he had been
summoning rushed back again before they had reached his
lips. But another thought gave him courage : "There's no
man could love her better, and leave her freer to follow the
Lord's work." They had been silent for many minutes now,
since they had done talking about Bessy Cranage ; Dinah
seemed almost to have forgotten Seth's presence, and her
pace was becoming so much quicker, that the sense of their
being only a few minutes' walk from the yard-gates of the HalJ
Farm at last gave Seth courage to speak.

ADAM BEDS. 3 1

You've quite made up your mind to go back to Snow-
field o' Saturday, Dinah ? "

" Yes," said' Dinah quietly. " I'm called there. It was
borne in upon my mind while I was meditating on Sunday
night, as sister Allen, who's in a decline, is in need of me.
I saw her as plain as we see that bit of thin white cloud, lifting
up her poor thin hand and beckoning to me. And this morn-
ing when I opened the Bible for direction, the first words my
eyes fell on were, ' And after we had seen the vision, imme-
diately we endeavored to go into Macedonia.' If it wasn't for
that clear showing of the Lord's will I should be loth to go,
for my heart yearns over my aunt and her little ones, and that
poor wandering lamb, Hetty Sorrel. I've been much drawn
out in prayer for her of late, and I look on it as a token that
there may be mercy in store for her."

" God grant it," said Seth. " For I doubt Adam's heart
is so set on her, he'll never turn to any body else ; and yet it
'ud go to my heart if he was to marry her, for I canna think
as she'd make him happy. It's a deep mystery — the way the
heart of man turns to one woman out of all the rest he's seen
i' the world, and makes it easier for him to work seven year
for her, like Jacob did for Rachel, sooner than have any other
woman for th' asking. I often think of them words, ' And
Jacob served seven years for Rachel ; and they seemed to
him but a few days for the love he had to her.' I know those
words 'ud come true with me, Dinah, if so be you'd give me
hope as I might win you after seven years was over, I know
you think a husband 'ud be taking up too much o' your
thoughts, because St. Paul says, * She that's married careth
for the things of the world, how she may please her husband ; '
and may happen you'll think me over-bold to speak to you
about it again, after what you told me o' your mind last
Saturday. But I've been t;hinking it over again by night and
by day, and I've prayed not to be blinded by my own desires
to think what's only good for me must be good for you
too. And it seems to me there's more texts for your marry-
ing than ever you can find against it. For St. Paul says as
plain as can be, in another place, ' I will that the younger
women marry, bear children, guide the house, give none occa-
sion to the adversary to speak reproachfully ; ' and then, ' two
are better than one ; ' and that holds good with marriage as
well as with other things. For we should be o' one heart
and o' one mind, Dinah. We both serve the same Master,
and are striving after the same gifts ; and I'd never be the

32 ADAM BEDE.

husbaiid to make a claim on you as could interfere with your
doing the work God has fitted you for. I'd make a shift, and
fend indoor and out, to give you more liberty — more than you
have now, and I'm strong enough to work for us both."

When Seth had onCe begun to urge his suit, he went on
earnestly, and almost hurriedly, lest Dinah should speak some
decisive word before he had poured forth all the arguments he
had prepared. His cheeks became flushed as he went on, his
mild gray eyes filled with tears, and his voice trembled as he
spoke the last sentence. They had reached one of those very
narrow passes between two tall stones, which performed the
office of a stile in Loamshire, and Dinah paused as she turned
toward Seth, and said, in her tender but calm treble notes,

" Seth Bede, I thank you for your love toward me, and if I
could think any man as more than a Christian brother, I think
it would be you. But my heart is not free to marry. That is
good for other women, and it is a great and a blessed thing to
be a wife and mother ; but ' as God had distributed to every
man, as the Lord hath called every man, so let him walk.'
God has called me to mimster to others, not to have any joys
or sorrows of my own, but to rejoice with them that do rejoice,
and to weep with those that weep. He has called me to speak
his word, and he has greatly owned my work. It could only
be on a very clear showing that I could leave the brethren and
sisters at Snowfield, who are favored with very little of this
world's good ; where the trees are few so that a child might
count them, and there's very hard living for the poor in the
winter. It has been given to me to help to comfort and
strengthen the little flock there, and to call in many wanderers ;
and my soul is filled with these things from my rising up till
my lying down. My life is too short, and God's work is too
great for me to think of making a home for myself in this
world. I've not turned a deaf ear to your words, Seth, for
when I saw as your love was given to me, I thought it might
be a leading of Providence for me to change my way of life,
and that we should be fellow-helpers ; and I spread the matter
before the Lord. But whenever I tried to fix my mind on
marriage, and our living together, other thoughts always came
in — the times when I've prayed by the sick and dying, and
the happy hours I've had preaching, when my heart was filled
with love, and the Word was given to me abundantly. And
when I've opened the Bible for direction, I've always lighted
on some clear word to tell me where my work lay. I believe
what you say, Seth, that you would try to be a help and not \

ADAM BEDS.

hindrance to my work ; but I see that our marriage is not
God's will — he draws my heart another way. I desire to live
and die without husband or children. I seem to have no room
in my soul for wants and fears of my own, it has pleased God
to fill my heart so full with the wants and sufferings of his
poor people."

Seth was unable to reply, and they walked on in silence.
At last, as they were nearly at the yard-gate, he said :

" Well, Dinah, I must seek for strength to bear it, and to
endure as seeing Him who is invisible. But I feel now how
weak my faith is. It seems as if, when you are gone, I could
never joy in anything any more. I think it's something pass-
ing the love of women as I feel for you, for I could be content
without your marrying me if I could go and live at Snowfield,
and be near you. I trusted as the strong love God had given
me toward you was a leading for us both ; but it seems it was
only meant for my trial. Perhaps I feel more for you than I
ought to feel for any creature, for I often can't help saying of
you what the hymn says :

" ' In darkest shades if she appear,

My dawnins; is begun ;
She is my soul's bright morning-star,
And she my rising sun.'

That may he wrong, and I am to be taught better. But you
wouldn't be displeased with me if things turned out so as I
could leave this country and go to live at Snowfield "i "

" No, Seth ; but I counsel you to wait patiently, and not
lightly to leave your own country and kindred. Do nothing
without the Lord's clear bidding. It's a bleak and barren
country there, not like this land of Goshen you've been used
to. We mustn't be in a hurry to fix and choose our own lot;
we must wait to be guided."

" But you'd let me write you a letter, Dinah, if there was
anything I wanted to tell you."

" Yes, sure ; let me know if you're in any trouble. You'll
be continually in my prayers."

They had now reached the yard-gate, and Seth said, "I
won't go in, Dinah, so farewell." He paused and hesitated
after she had given him her hand, and then said, " There is no
knowing but what you may see things different after a while.
There may be a new leading."

" Let us leave that, Seth. It's good to live only a moment
at a time, as I've read in one of Mr. Wesley's books. It isn't
i

ADAM BEDS.

for you and me to lay plans ; we've nothing to do but to obey

and to trust. Farewell."

Dinah pressed his hand with rather a sad look in her loving
eyes, and then passed through the gate, while Seth turned
away to walk lingeringly home. But, instead of taking the
direct road, he chose to turn back along the field through
which he and Dinah had already passed • and I think his blue
linen handkerchief was very wet with tears long before he had
made up his mind that it was time for him to set his face
steadily home'ward. He was but three-and-lwenty, and had
just learned what it is to love — to love with that adoration
which a young man gives to a woman whom he feels to be
greater and better than himself. Love of this sort is hardly
distinguishable from religious feeling. What deep and worthy
love is so ? whether of woman or child, or art or music. Our
caresses, our tender words, our still rapture under the intiu-
ence of autumn sunsets, or pillared vistas, or calm, majestic
statues, or Beethoven symphonies, all bring with them the con-
sciousness that they are mere waves and ripples in an un-
fathomable ocean of love and beauty : our emotion in its keen-
est moment passes from expression into silence ; our love at
its highest flood rushes beyond its object, and loses itself in
the sense of divine mystery. And this blessed gift of venera-
ting love has been given to too many humble craftsmen since
the world began, for us to feel any surprise that it should have
existed in the soul of a Methodist carpenter half a century
ago, while there was yet a lingering after-glow from the time
when Wesley and his fellow-laborer fed on the hips and haws
of the Cornwall hedges, after exhausting limbs and lungs in
carrying a divine message to the poor.

That after-glow has long faded away ; and the picture we
are apt to make of Methodism in our imagination is not an am-
ohitheatre of green hills, or the deep shade of broad-leaved
sycamores, where a crowd of rough men and weary-hearted
women drank in a faith which was a rudimentary culture, which
linked their thoughts with the past, lifted their imagination
above the sordid details of their own narrow lives, and suf-
fused their souls with the sense of a pitying, loving, infinite
Presence, sweet as summer to the houseless needy. It is too
possible that to some of my readers Methodism may mean
nothing more than low pitched gables up dingy streets, sleek
grocers, sponging preachers, and hypocritical jargon — ele-
ments which are re?;arded as an exhaustive analysis of Metho-
dism in liiairy lashionable quarters.

ADAM BEDE.

That would be a pity; for I cannot pretend that Seth and
Dinah were anything else than Methodists — not, indeed, of
that modern type which reads quarterly reviews and attends
in chapels with pillared porticoes, but of a very old-fashioned
kind. They believed in present miracles, in instantaneous
conversions, in revelations by dreams and visions ; they drew
lots and sought for Divine guidance by opening the Bible at
hazard ; having a literal way of interpreting the Scriptures,
which is not at all sanctioned by approved commentators ;
and it is impossible for me to represent their diction as cor-
rect, or their instruction as liberal. Still — if I have read re-
ligious history aright — faith, hope, and charity have not always
been found in a direct ratio with a sensibility to the three
concords ; and it is possible, thank Heaven ! to have very
erroneous theories and very sublime feelings. The raw bacon
which clumsy Molly spares from her own scanty store, that
she may carry it to her neighbor's child to " stop the fits,"
may be a piteously inefifiacious remedy ; but the generous
stirring of neighborly kindness that prompted the deed has a
beneficent radiation that is not lost.

Considering these things, we can hardly think Dinah and
Seth beneath our sympathy, accustomed as we may be to weep
over the loftier sorrows of heroines in satin boots and crino-
line, and of heroes riding fiery horses, themselves ridden by
still more fiery passions.

Poor Seth ! he was never on horseback in his life except
once, when he was a little lad, and Mr. Jonathan Burge took
him up behind, telling him to " hold on tight ; " and, instead
of bursting out into wild accusing apostrophes to God and des-
tin}', he is resolving, as he now walks homeward under the
solemn starlight, to repress his sadness, to be less bent on hav-
ing his own will, and to live more for others, as Dinah does.

CHAPTER IV.

HOME AND ITS SORROWS.

A GREEN valley with a brook running through it, full al-
most to overflowing with the late rains, overhung by low
Stooping willows. Across this brook a plank is thrown, and

36 ADAM BEDS.

over this plank Adam Bede is passing with his undoubting
step, followed close by Gyp with the basket, evidently making
his way to the thatched house, with a stack of timber by the
side of it, about twenty yards up the opposite slope.

The door of the house is open, and an elderly woman ia
looking out ; but she is not placidly contemplating the eveninff
sunshine ; she has been watchmg with dim eyes the gradually
enlarging speck which for the last few minutes she has been
quite sure is her darling son Adam. Lisbeth Bede loves her
son with the love of a woman to whom her ftrst-born has come
late in life. She is an anxious, spare, yet vigorous old woman,
clean as a snowdrop. Her gray hair is turned neatly back
under a pure linen cap with a black band round it ; her broad
chest is covered with a buff neckerchief and below this you
see a sort of short bed-gown made of blue checkered linen,
tied round the waist and descending to the hips, from whence
there is a considerable length of linsey-woolsey petticoat.
For Lisbeth is tall, and in other points, too, there is a strong
likeness between her and her son Adam. Her dark eyes are
somewhat dim now — perhaps from too much crying — but her
broadly marked eyebrows are still black, her teeth are sound,
and, as she stands knitting rapidly and unconsciously with
her work- hardened hands, she has as firmly-upright an atti-
tude as when she is carrying a pail of water on her head from
the spring. There is the same type of frame and the same
keen activity of temperament in mother and son, but it was
not from her that Adam got his well-filled brow and his ex-
pression of large-hearted intelligence.

Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature,
that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and
muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains ;
blends yearning and repulsion, and ties us by our heart-strings
to the beings that jar us at every movement. We hear a
voice with the very cadence of our own uttering the thoughts
we despise ; we see eyes — ah ! so like our mother's — averted
from us in cold alienation ; and our last darling child startles
us with the air and gestures of the sister we parted from in
bitterness long years ago. The father to whom we owe our
best heritage — the mechanical instinct, the keen sensibility to
harmony, the unconscious skill of the modelling hand — galls
us, and puts us to shame by his daily errors ; the long-lost
mother, whose face we begin to see in the glass as our own
wrinkles come, once fretted our young souls with her anxious
humors and irrational persistence.

ADAM BEDE. «»

It is such a fond anxious mother's voice that you hear as
Lisbeth says,

" Well, my lad, it's gone seven by th' clock. Thee't allays
stay till the last child's born. Thee wants thy supper, I'll
warrand. Where's Seth .? gone arter some o's chapellin', I
reckon ? "

" Ay, ay, Seth's at no harm, mother, thee mayst be sure.
But Where's father? " said Adam, quickly, as he entered the
house and glanced into the room on the left hand, which was
used as a workshop. " Hasn't he done the coffin for Tholer }
There's the stuff standing just as I left it this morning."

" Done the coffin ? " said Lisbeth, following him, and
knitting uninterruptedly, though she looked at her son very
anxiously. " Eh, my lad, he went aflf to Treddles'on this
forenoon, an's niver come back. I doubt he's got to th'
' Wagin Overthrow ' again."

A deep Hush of anger passed rapidly over Adam's face.
He said nothing but threw off his jacket, and began to roll
up his shirt-sleeves again.

" What art goin' to do, Adam ? " said the mother, with a
tone and look of alarm. " Thee wouldstna go to work again
wi'out ha'in' thy bit o' supper 1 "

Adam, too angry to speak, walked into the workshop. But
his mother threw down her knitting, and, hurrying after him,
took hold of his arm, and said, in a tone of plaintive remon-
strance,

" Nay, my lad, my lad, thee munna go wi'out thy supper ;
there's the taters wi' the gravy in 'em, just as thee lik'st 'em.
I sav'd 'em o' purpose for thee. Come an' ha' thy supper,
come."

" Let be ! " said Adam impetuously, shaking her off, and
seizing one of the planks that stood against the wall. " It's
fine talking about having supper when here's a coffin prom-
ised to be ready at Brox'on by seven o'clock to-morrow
morning, and ought to ha' been there now, and not a nail
struck yet. My throat's too full to swallow victuals."

" Wh)^, thee canstna get the coffin ready," said Lisbeth.
" Thee't work thyself to death. It 'ud take thee all night to
do't."

" What signifies how long it takes me ? Isn't the coffin
promised.? Can they bury the man without a coffin? I'd
work my right hand off sooner than deceive people with lies
i' that way. It makes me mad to think on't. I shall over-
run these doings before long. I've stood enough of 'em."

38 ADAM BEDE,

Poor Lisbeth did not hear this threat for the first time,
and if she had been wise she wouid iiave gone away quietly,
and said nothing for the next hour. But one of the lessons a
woman most rarely learns, is never to talk to an angry or a
drunken man. Lisbeth sat down on the chopping bench and
began to cry, and by the time she had cried enough to make
her voice very piteous, she burst out into words.

" Nay, my lad, my lad, thee wouldstna go away an' break
thv mother's heart, an' leave thy feyther to ruin. Thee
woukistna ha' 'em carry me to th' church-yard, an' thee not to
follow me. I shanna rest i' my grave if I dunna see thee at
th' last, an' how's they to let thee know as I'm a-dyin' if
thee't gone a workin' i' distant parts, an' Seth belike gone
arter thee, and thy feyther not able t' hold a pen for's hand
shakin', besides not knowin' where thee art. Thee mun forgie
thy feyther — thee munna be so bitter again' him. He war a
good feyther to thee afore he took to th' drink. He's a clever
workman, an' taught thee thy trade, remember, an's niver gen
me a blow nor so much as an ill word — no, not even in's
drink. Thee wouldstna ha' 'm go to th' workhus — thy own
feyther — an' him as was a fine-growed man an' handv at
iverythin' a'most as thee art thysen, five an' twenty 'ear ago.
when thee wast a baby at the breast."

Lisbeth's voice became louder, and choked with sobs:
a sort of wail, the most irritating of all sounds where real
sorrows are to be borne, and real work to be done. Adam
broke in impatiently.

" Now, mother, don't cry, and talk so. Haven't I got
enough to vex me without that ? What's th' use o" telling me
things as I only think too much on every day? If I didna
think on 'em, why should I do as I do, for the sake o' keep-
ing things together here 1 But I hat3 to be talking where it's
no use ; I like to keep my breath for doing instead o' talk-
ing."

" I know thee dost things as nobody else 'ud do, my lad.
But thee 't allays so hard upo' thy feyther, Adam. Thee
think'st nothing too much to do for Seth ; thee snapp'st me
up if iver I find faut wi' th' lad. But thee 't so angered wi'
thy feyther, more nor wi' any body else."

"That's better than speaking soft, and letting things go
the wrong way, I reckon, isn't it ? If I wasn't sharp with
him, he'd sell every bit o' stuff i' th' yard, and spend it on
drink. I know there's a duty to be done by my father, but
it isn't my duty to encourage him in running headlong to ruin.

ADA.V BEDE.

And what has Seth got to do with it ? The lad does no harm
as I know of. But leave me alone, mother, and let me get
on with the work."

Lisbeth dared not say any more ; but she got up and
called Gyp, thinking to console herself somewhat for Adam's
refusal of the supper she had spread out in the loving expec-
tation of looking at him while he ate, by feeding Adam's dog
with extra liberality. But Gyp was watching his master with
wrinkled brow and ears erect, puzzled at this unusual course
of things ; and though he glanced at Lisbeth when she called
him, and moved his fore-paws uneasily, well knowing that she
was inviting him to supper, he was in a divided state of mind
and remained seated on his haunches, again fixing his eyes
anxiously on his master. Adam noticed Gyp's mental conflict,
and though his anger had made him less tender than usual to
his mother, it did not prevent him from caring as much as
usual for his dog. We are apt to be kinder to the brutes
that love us than to the women that love us. Is it because
the brutes are dumb .'

" Go, Gyp ; go, lad ! " Adam said, in a tone of encourag-
ing command ; and Gyp, apparently satisfied that duty and
pleasure were one, followed Lisbeth into the house-place.

But no sooner had he licked up his supper than he went
back to his master, while Lisbeth sat down alone, to cry over
her knitting. Women who are never bitter and resentful are
often the most querulous ; and if Solomon was as wise as he
is reputed to be, I feel sure that when he con^pared a conten-
tious woman to a continual dropping on a very rainy day, he
had not a vixen in his eye — a fury with long nails, acrid and
selfish. Depend upon it, he meant a good creature, who had
no joy but in the happiness of the loved ones whom she con-
tributed to make uncomfortable, putting by all the tid-bits for
them, and spending nothing on herself. Such a woman as
Lisbeth, for example — at once patient and complaining, self-
renouncing and exacting, brooding the livelong day over what
happened yesterday, and what is likely to happen to-morrow,
and crying very readily both at the good and the evil. But a
certain awe mingled itself with her idolatrous love of Adam,
and when he said, "leave me alone," she was always
silenced.

So the hours passed, to the loud ticking of the old day-
clock and the sound of Adam's tools. At last he called for a
light and a draught of water (beer was a thing only to be
drunk on holidays), and Lisbeth ventured to say as she

40 ADAM BEDE.

took it in, " Thy supper stan's ready for thee, when thee
lik'st."

'• Donna thee sit up, mother," said Adam, in a gentle
tone. He had worked off his anger now, and whenever he
wished to be especially kind to his mother, he fell into his
strongest native accent and dialect, with which at other times
his speech was less deeply tinged. " I'll see to father when
he comes home ; maybe he wonna come at all to-night. I
shall be easier if thee't i' bed."

" Nay, I'll bide till Seth comes. He wonna be long now,
I reckon."

It was then past nine by the clock, which was always in
advance of the day, and before it had struck ten the latch
was lifted, and Seth entered. He had heard the sound of
the tools as he was approaching.

" Why, mother," he said, " how is it as father's working
so late ? "

" It's none o' thy father as is a-workin'-^thee might know
that well anoof if thy head warna full o' chapellin' — it's thy
brother as does ivery thing, for there's niver nobody else i' th'
way to do nothin'."

Lisbeth was going on, for she was not at all afraid of Seth,
and usually poured into his ears all the querulousness which
was repressed by her awe of Adam. S»th had never in his
life spoken a harsh word to his mother, and timid people
always wreak their peevishness on the gentle. But Seth, with
an anxious look, had passed into the workshop, and said,

" Addy, how's this ? What ! father's forgot the coffin? "

"Ay, lad, th' old tale; but I shall get it done," said Adam,
looking up, and casting one of his bright, keen glaaces at his
brother. " Why, what's the matter with thee } Thee't in
trouble."

Seth's eyes were red, and there was a look of deep depres-
sion on his mild face.

" Yes, Addy, but it's what must be borne, and can't be
helped. Why, thee'st never been to the school, then ? "

" School ! no ; that screw can wait," said Adam, hammer-
ing away again.

" Let me take my turn now, and do thee go to bed," said
Seth.

"No, lad, I'd rather go on, now I'm in harness. Thee't
help me to carry it to Brox'on when it's done. I'll call thee
up at sunrise. Go and eat thy supper, and shut the door, so
as I mayn't hear mother's talk."

ADAM BEDE. 41

Seth knew that Adam always meant what he said, and
was not to be persuaded into meaning anything else ; so he
turned, with rather a heavy heart, into the house-place.

'"Adams niver touched a bit o' victual sin' home he's
come," said Lisbeth. " I reckon thee'st had thy supper at
some o' thy Methody folks."

" Nay, mother," said Seth, " I've had no supper yet."

" Come, then," said Lisbeth, " but donna thee ate the
taters, for Adam 'ull happen ate 'em if 1 leave'em stannin'.
He loves a bit o' taters an gravy. But he's been so sore an'
angered, he wouldn't ate 'em, for all I'd putten 'em by o' pur-
pose for him. An' he's been a threatenin" to go away again,"
she went on, whimpering, "an I'm fast sure he'll go some
dawnin' afore I'm up, an' niver let me know aforehand, an'
he'll niver come back again when once he's gone. An' I'd
better niver ha' had a son, as is like no other body's son for
the deftness an' th' handiness, an' so looked on by th' grit
folks, an' tall an' upright like a poplar tree, an' me to be
parted from him, an' niver see'm no more."

" Come, mother, donna grieve thyself in vain," said Seth,
in a soothing voice. " Thee'st not half so good reason to
think as Adam 'ull go away as to think he'll stay with thee.
He may say such a thing when he's in wrath — and he's got
excuse for being wrathful sometimes — but his heart 'ud never
let him ^ . Think how he's stood by us all when it's been
none so asy — paying his savings to free me from going for a
soldier, and turnin' his earnin's into wood for father, when
he's got pi ntv o' uses for his money, and many a young man
like him 'ud hd' been married and settled before now. He'll
never turn round and knock down his own work, and forsake
them as it's been the labor of his life to stand by."

" Donna talk to me about's marr'in'," said Lisbeth, crying
afresh. " He's set's heart on that Hetty Sorrel, as 'ull niver
save a penny, an' 'ull toss up her head at's old mother. An'
to think as he might ha' Mary Burge, an' be took partners,
an' be a big man wi' workmen under him, like ]\Iester Burge
— Dolly's told me so o'er an' o'er again — if it warna as he's
set's heart on that bit of a wench, as is o' no more use nor
the gilly-flower on the wall. An' he so wise at bookin' an'
figurin', an' not to know no better nor that ! "

" But, mother, thee know'st we canna love just where
other folks 'ud have us. There's nobody but God can con-
trol the heart of man. I could ha' wished myself as Adam
could ha' made another choice, but I wouldn't reproach him

42 ADAM BEDE.

for wliat he can't help. And I'm not sure but what he tries
to overcome it. But it's a matter as he doesn't like to be
spoke to about, and I can only pray to the Lord to bless and
direct him."

" Ay, thee't allays ready enough at pr^yin', but I donna
see as thee gets much wi' thy prayin'. Thee wotna get double
earnin's o' this side Yule, Th' Methodies '11 niver make thee
half the man thy brother is, for all they're a-making a preacher
on thee."

" It's partly truth thee speak'st there, mother," said Seth,
mildly ; " Adam's far before me, an's done more for me than
I can ever do for him. God distributes talents to every man
according as he sees good. But thee mustna undervally prayer.
Prayer mayna bring money, but it brings us what no money
can buy — a power to keep from sin, and be content with God's
will whatever He may please to send. If thee wouldst pray
to God to help thee, and trust in His goodness, thee wouldstna
be so uneasy about things."

"Unaisy? I'm i' th' right on't to be unaisy. It's well
seen on thee what it is niver to be unaisy. Thee't gi' away
all thy earnin's an' niver be unaisy as thee'st nothin' laid up
again' a rainy day. If Adam had been as aisy as thee, he'd
niver ha' had no money to pay for thee. Take no thou;"ht
for the morrow — take no thought — that's what thee't allays
sayin' ; an' what comes on't ? Why, as Adam has to take
thought for thee."

" Those are the words o' the Bible, mother," said Seth.
" They don't mean as we should be idle. They mean we
shouldn't be over-anxious and worreting ourselves about what'U
happen to-morrow, but do our duty, and leave the rest to
God's will."

" Ay, ay, that's the way wi' thee : thee allaj's makes a
peck o' thy own words out o' a pint o' the Bible's. I donna
see how thee't to know as ' take no thought for the morrow'
means all that. An' when the Bible's such a big book, an'
thee canst read all thro't, an' ha' pick o' the texes, I canna
think why thee dostna pick b'^.tter words as donna mean so
much more nor they say. Adam doesna pick a that'n ; I can
understan' the tex' as he's allays a-saying', ' God helps them
as helps iheirsens."

" Nay, mother." said Seth, " that's no text o' the Bible.
It comes out of a book as Adam picked up at the stall at
Treddle'son. It was wrote by a knowing man, but over-
worldly, I doubt. However, that saying's partly true ; for th«
Bible tells us we must be workers top-f^t-Iier with God."

ADAM BEDE. 4^

"Well how'm I to know? It sounds like a tex'. But
what's the matter wi' th' lad ? Thee't hardly eatin' a bit o'
supper. Dostna mean to ha' no more nor that bit o' oat-cake ?
An' thee looks as white as a liick o' new bacon. What's th'
matter wi' thee ? "

" Nothing to mind about, mother; I'm not hungr}-. I'll
just look in at Adam again, and see if he'll let me go on with
the coffin."

'• Ha' a drop o'warm broth," said Lisbeth, whose motherly
feeling now got the better of her "nattering" habit. ''I'll
set two-three sticks alight in a minute."

" Nay, mother, thank thee ; thee't very good." said Seth,
gratefully ; and, encouraged by this touch of tenderness, he
went on : " Let us pray a bit with thee for father, and Adam,
and all of us ; it'll comfort thee, happen, more than thee
think'st."

" Well, I've nothin' to say again' it."

Lisbeth, though disposed always to take the negative side
in her conversations with Seth, had a vague sense that there
was some comfort and safety in the fact of his piety, and that
it somehow relieved her from the trouble of any spiritual trans-
actions on her own behalf.

So the mother and son knelt down together, and Seth
prayed for the poor wandering father, and (or those who were
sorrowing for him at home. And when he came to the peti-
tion that Adam might never be called to set up his tent in a
far countr\', but that his mother might be cheered and com-
forted by his presence all the days other pilgrimage, Lisbeth's
ready tears flowed again, and she wept aloud.

When they rose from their knees, Seth went to Adam
vtgain, and said, " Wilt only lie down for an hour or two, and
let me go on the while ? "

" No, Seth. no. Make mother go to bed, and go thyself."

Meantime Lisbeth had dried her eyes, and now followed
Seth, holding something in her hands. It was the brown-and-
yellow platter containing the baked potatoes with the gravy
in them, and bits of meat, which she cut and mixed among
them. Those were dear times, when wheaten bread and fresh
meat were delicacies to working people. She set the dish
down rather timidly on the bench by Adam's side, and said,
" Thee canst pick a bit w^hile thee't workin'. I'll bring thee
another drop o' water."

" Av. mother, do " said Adam, kindly, " I'm getting very
thirstv."

ADAM BEDE.

In half an hour all was quiet ; no sound was to be heard
in the house but the loud ticking of the old day-clock, and
the ringing of Adam's tools. The night was very still : when
Adam opened the door to look out at twelve o'clock the only
motion seemed to be in the glowing, twinkling stars ; every
blade of grass was asleep.

Bodily haste and exertion usually leave our thoughts very
much at the mercy of our feelings and imagination ; and it
was so to-night with Adam. While his muscles were work-
ing lustily, his mind seemed as passive as a spectator at a
diorama ; scenes of the sad past, and probably sad future,
floating before him, and giving place one to tlie other in swift
succession.

He saw how it would be to-morrow morning, when he had
carried the coffin to Broxton and was at home again, having
his breakfast : his father, perhaps, would come in, ashamed
to meet his son's glance — would sit down, looking older and
more tottering than he had done the morning before, and hang
down his head, examining the floor-quarries ; while Lisbeth
would ask him how he supposed the coffin had been got ready,
that he had slinked off and left undone, for Lisbeth was al-
ways the first to utter the word of reproach, although she cried
at Adam's severity toward his father.

" So it will go on, worsening and worsening," thought
Adam ; " there's no slipping up hill again, and no standing
still when once you've begun to slip down." And then the
day came back to him when he was a little fellow, and used
to run by his father's side, proud to be taken out to work, and
prouder still to hear his father boasting to his fellow-workmen
how " the little chap had an uncommon notion o' carpenter-
ing." What a fine, active fellow his father was then ! When
people asked Adam whose little lad he was? he had a sense
of distinction as he answered. " I'm Thias Bede's lad," — he
was quite sure every body knew Thias Bede ; didn't he make
the wonderful pigeon-house at Broxton parsonage ? Those
were happy days, especially when Seth, who was three years
the younger, began to go out working too, and Adam began
to be a teacher as well as a learner. But then came the days
of sadness, when Adam was some way on in his teens, and
Thias began to loiter at the public-houses, and Lisbetii began
to cry at home, and to pour forth her plaints in the hearing
of her sons. Adam remembered well the night of shame and
anguish when he first saw his father quite wild and foolish,
shouting a song out fitfully among his drunken companions at

A^AM BE3E.

the " Wagon Overthrown." He had run away once when he
was only eighteen, making his escape in the morning twilight
with a little blue bundle over his shoulder, and his " mensura-
tion book " in his pocket, and saying to himself very decidedly
that he could bear the vexations of home no longer — he would
go and seek his fortune, setting up his stick at the crossways
and bending his steps the way it fell. But by the time he got
to Stoniton, the thought of his mother and Seth, left behind
to endure everything without him, became too importunate,
and his resolution failed him. He came back the next day,
but the misery and terror his mother had gone through in
those two days had haunted her ever since.

" No ! " Adam said to himself to-night, " that must never
happen again. It 'ud make a poor balance when my doings
are cast up at the last, if my poor old mother stood o' the
wrong side. My back's broad enough and strong enough ; I
should be no better than a coward to go away and leave the
troubles to be borne by them as aren't half so able. ' They
that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of those that are
weak, and not to please themselves.' There's a text wants
no candle to show't ; it shines by its own light. It's plain
enough you get into the wrong road i' this life if you run after
this and that only for the sake o' making things easy and pleas-
ant to yourself. A pig may poke his nose into the trough
and think o' nothing outside it ; but if you've got a man's
heart and soul in you, you can't be easy a-making your own
bed an' leaving the rest to lie on the stones. Nay, nay, I'll
never slip my neck out o' the yoke, and leave the load to be
drawn by the weak 'uns. Father's a sore cross to me, an's likely
to be for many a long year to come. What then ? I've got
th' health, and the limbs, and the sperrit to bear it."

At this moment a smart rap, as if with a willow wand, was
given at the house door, and Gyp, instead of barking, as
might have been expected, gave a loud howl. Adam, very
much startled, went at once to the door and opened it. Noth-
ing was there : all was still, as when he opened it an hour be-
fore ; the leaves were motionless, and the light of the stars
showed the placid fields on both sides of the brook quite
empty of visible life. Adam walked round the house, and
still saw nothing except a rat which darted into the wood-shed
as he passed. He went in again, wondering ; the sound
was so peculiar that, the moment he heard it, it called up the
image of the willow wand striking the door. He could not
help a little shudder, as he remembered how often his mother

46 ADAM BEDE.

had told him of just such a sound coining as a sign when some
one was dying. Adam was not a man to be gratuitously super-
stitous ; but he had the blood of the peasant in him as well as
of the artisan, and a peasant can no aore help believing in a
traditional superstition than a horse can help trembling when
he sees a camel. Besides, he had that mental combination
which is at once humble in the region of mystery and keen in
the region of knowledge : it was the depth of his reverence
quite as much as his hard common sense, which gave him his
disinclination to doctrinal religion, and he often checked
Seth's argumentative spiritualism by saying, " Eh, its a big
mystery ; thee know'st but little about it." And so it hap-
pened that Adam was at once penetrating and credulous. Jf
a new building had fallen down and he had been told that,
this was a divine judgment, he would have said, " May be ;
but the bearing o' the roof and walls wasn't right, else it
wouldn't ha' come down ;" yet he believed in dreams and
prognostics, and you see he shuddered at the idea of the
stroke with the willow wand.

But he had the best antidote against imaginative dread
in the necessity for getting on with the coffin, and for the
next ten minutes his hammer was ringing so uninterruptedly
that other sounds, if there were any, might well be overpow-
ered. A pause, came, however, when he had to take up his
ruler, and now again came the strange rap, and again Gyp
howled. Adam was at the door without the loss of a moment ;
but again all was still, and the starlight showed there was
nothing but the dew-laden grass in front of the cottage.

Adam for a moment thought uncomfortably about his
father ; but of late years he had never come home at dark
hours from Treddleston, and there was every reason for be-
lieving that he was then sleeping off his drunkenness at the
" Wagon Overthrown." Besides, to Adam the conception ot
the future was so inseparable from the painful image of his
father, that the fear of any fatal accident to him was excluded
by the deeply-infixed fear of his continual degradation. The
next thought that occurred to him was one that made liim
slip off his shoes and tread lightly up stairs, to listen at the
bed-room doors. But both Seth and his mother were breath^
ing regularly.

Adam came down and set to work again, saying to him-
self, " I won't open the door again. It's no use staring about
to catch sight of a sound. Maybe there's a world about us
as we can't see, but th' ear's quicker than the eye, and catches

ADAM BEDE.

a sound frorn't now and then. Some people think they get a
si^ht on 't too, but they're mostly folks whose eyes are not
much use to 'em at anything else. For my part, I think it's
better to see when your perpendicular's true, tnan to see a
ghost."

Such thoughts as these are apt to grow stronger and
stronger as davlight quenches the candles and the birds begin
to sing. By the time the red sunlight shone on the brass
nails that formed the initials on the lid of the coffin, any
lingering foreboding from the sound of the willow wand was
merged in satisfaction that the work was done and the prom-
ise redeemed. There was no need to call Seth, for he was
already moving overhead, and presently came down stairs.

" Now, lad," said Adam, as Seth made his appearance,
" the coffin's done, and we can take it over to Brox'on and be
back again before half after six. I'll take a mouthful o' oat-
cake, and then we'll be off."

The coffin was soon propped on the tall shoulders of the
two brothers, and they were making their way, followed close
by Gyp, out of the little wood-yard into the lane at the back
of the house. It was but about a mile and a half to Broxton
over the opposite slope, and their road wound very pleasantly
along lanes and across fields, where the pale woodbines and
the dog-roses were scenting the hedgerows, and the birds were
twittering and trilling in the tall leafy boughs of oak and elm.
It was a strangely-mingled picture — the fresh youth of the
summer morning, with its Eden-like peace and loveliness, the
stalwart strength of the two brothers in their rusty working-
clothes, and the long coffin on their shoulders. They paused
for the last time before a small farm-house outside the village
of Broxton. By six o'clock the task was done, the coffin nailed
down, and Adam and Seth were on their way home. They
chose a shorter way homeward, which would take them across
the fields and the brook in front of the house. Adam had
not mentioned to Seth what had happened in the night, but
he still retained sufficient impression from it himself to say,

" Seth, lad, if father isn't come home by the time we've
had our breakfast, I think it'll be as well for thee to go over
to Treddles'on and look after him, and thee canst get me the
brass wire I want. Never mind about losing an hour at thy
work ; we can make that up. What dost say ? "

" I'm willing," said Seth. " But see what clouds have
gathered since we set out. I'm thinking we shall have more
rain. It'll be a sore time for th' haymaking if the meadows

48 ADAM BEDE.

are flooded again. The brook's fine and full now \ another
day's rain 'ud cover the plank, and we should have to go round
by the road."

They were coming across the valley now, and had entered
the pasture through which the brook ran.

" Why, what's that sticking against the willow ? " continued
Seth, beginning to walk faster. Adam's heart rose to his
mouth ; the vague anxiety about his father was changed into
a great dread. He made no answer to Seth, but ran forward,
preceded by Gyp, who began to bark uneasily ; and in two
moments he was at the bridge.

This was what the omen meant, then ! And the gray-
haired father, of whom he had thought with a sort of hardness
a few hours ago, as certain to live to be a thorn in his side,
was perhaps even then struggling with that watery death.
This was the first thought that flashed through Adam's con-
science, before he had time to seize the coat and drag out the
tall heavy body. Seth was already by his side, helping him ;
and when they had it on the bank, the two sons in the first
moments knelt and looked with mute awe at the glazed eyes,
forgetting that there was need of action — forgetting every
thing but that their father lay dead before them. Adam was
the first to speak.

" I'll run to mother," he said, in a loud whisper. " I'll be
back to thee in a minute."

Poor Lisbeth was busy preparing her sons' breakfast, and
their porridge was already steaming on the fire. Her kitchen
always looked the pink of cleanliness, but this morning she
was more than usually bent on making her hearth and break-
fast-table look comfortable and inviting.

"The lads 'uU be fine an' hungry," she said, half aloud, as
she stirred the porridge. " It's a good step to Brox'on, an'
it's hungry air o'er the hill — wi' that heavy coffin too. Eh !
it's heavier now, wi' poor Bob Tholer in't. Howiver, I've
made a drop more porridge nor common this mornin'. The
feyther 'uU happen come in arter a bit. Not as he'll ate much
porridge. He swallers sixpennorth o' ale, an' saves a hap'orth
o' porridge — that's his way o' layin' by money, as I've told
him many a time, an' am likely to tell him again afore the
day's out. Eh ! poor mon, he takes it quiet enough ; there's
no denyin' that."

But now Lisbeth heard the heavy " thud " of a running
footstep on the turf, and, turning quickly toward the door, she
saw Ada«i enter, looking so pale and averwhelmed that she

AnAM BEDE.

screamed aloud and rushed toward him before he had time to
speak.

" Hush, mother," Adam said rather hoarsely, " don't be
frightened. Father's tumbled into the water. Belike we may
bring him round again. Seth and me are going to carry him
in. Get a blanket, and make it hot at the fire."

In reality Adam was convinced that his father was dead,
but he knew there was no other way of repressing his mother's
impetuous wailing grief than by occupying her with some
active task which had hope in it.

He ran back to Seth, and the two sons lifted the sad
burden in heart-stricken silence. The wide-open, glazed
eyes were gray, like Seth's, and had once looked with mild
pride on the boys before whom Thias had lived to hang
his head in shame. Seth's chief feeling was awe and distress
at this sudden snatching away of his father's soul ; but
Adam's mind rushed back over the past in a flood of re-
lenting and pity. When Death, the great Reconciler, has
come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our
severity.

CHAPTER V.

THE RECTOR.

Before twelve o'clock there had been some heavy storms

of rain, and the water lay in deep gutters on the sides of the
gravel-walks in the garden of Broxton Parsonage ; the great
Provence roses had been cruelly tossed by the wind and
beaten by the rain, and all the delicate-stemmed border-
flowers had been dashed down and stained with the wet soil.
A melancholy morning — because it was nearly time hay
harvest should begin, and instead of that the meadows were
likely to be flooded.

But people who have pleasant homes get in-door enjoy-
ments that they would never think of but for the rain. If it
had not been a wet morning Mr. Irwine would not have been
in the dining-room playing at chess with his mother, and he
loves both his mother and chess quite well enough to pass
some eUudy hours very easily by their help. Let me take you

ADAM BEDE.

into that dining-room, and show you the Rev. Adolphus
Irwine Rector of Broxton, Vicar of Hayslope, and Vicar of
Blythe, a pluralist at whom the severest Church-reformer
would have found it difficult to look sour. We will enter very
softly, and stand still in the open doorway, without awaking
the glossy-brown setter who is stretched across the hearth,
with her two puppies beside her ; or the pug, who is dozing
with his black muzzle aloft, like a sleepy president.

The room is a large and lofty one, with an ample mul-
lioned oriel window at one end ; the walls, you see, are new,
and not yet painted ; but the furniture, though originally of
in expensive sort, is old and scanty, and there is no drapery
about the window. The crimson cloth over the large dining-
table is very threadbare, though it contrasts pleasantly enough
with the dead hue of the plaster on the walls ; but on this
■cloth there is a massive silver waiter with a decanter of water
on it, of the same pattern as two larger ones that are propped
up on the sideboard with a coat of arms conspicuous in their
centre. You suspect at once that the inhabitants of this room
have iniierited more blood than wealth, and would not be sur-
prised to find that Mr. Irwine had a hnely-cut nostril and
upper lip ; but at present we can only see that he has a broad
flat back and an abundance of powdered hair, all thrown back-
ward and tied behind with a black ribbon — a bit of conserv-
atism in costume which tells you that he is not a young man.
He will perhaps turn round by and by, and in the mean time
we can look at that stately old lady, his mother, a beautiful
aged brunette, whose rich-toned complexion is well set off by
the complex wrappings of pure white cambric and lace about
her head and neck. She is as erect in her comely embonpoint
as a statue of Ceres, and her dark face, with its delicate
aquiline nose, firm proud mouth, and small intense black eye,
is so keen and sarcastic in its expression that you instinctively
substitute a pack of cards for the chess-men, and imagine
her telling your fortune. The small brown hand with which
she is lifting her queen is laden v/ith pearls, diamonds, and
turquoises ; and the large black veil is very carefully adjusted
over the crown of her cap, and falls in sharp contrast on the
white folds about her neck. It must take a long time to dress
that old lady in the morning ! But it seems a law of nature
that she should be dressed so ; she is clearly one of those
children of loyalty who have never doubted their right
divine, and never met with zx\y one so absurd as to ques-
tion it.

ADAM BEDE.

"There, Dauphin, tell me what that is I" says this mag-
nificent old ladv, as she deposits her queen very quietly and
folds her arnis. •' I should be sorry to utter a word disagree-
able to your feelings."

" Ah ! you witch-mother, you sorceress ! How is a Chris-
tian man to win a game of you ? I should have sprinkled the
board with holy water before we began. You've not won that
game by fair means, now, so don't pretend it."

'• Yes, yes, that's what the beaten have always said of
great conquerors. But see, there's the sunshine falling on
that board, to show you more clearly what a foolish move
you made with that pawn. Come, shall I give you another
chance ? "

" No, mother, I shall leave you to your own conscience,
now it's clearing up. We must go and plash up the mud q
little, mustn't we, Juno ?" This was addressed to the brown
setter, who had jumped up at the sound of the voices and laid
her nose in an insinuating way on her master's leg. " But I
must go up stairs first and see Anne. I was called away to
Tholer's funeral just when I was going before."

" It's of no use, child ; she can't speak to you. Kate says
she has one of her worst headaches this morning."

" Oh, she likes me to go and see her just the same ; she's
never too ill to care about that."

If you know how much of human speech is mere purpose-
less impulse or habit, you will not wonder when I tell you that
this identical objection had been made, and had received
the same kind of answer, many hundred times in the course
of the fifteen years that Mr. Irwine's sister Anne had been
an invalid. Splendid old ladies, who take a long time to
dress in the morning, have often slight sympathy with sickly
daughters.

But while Mr. Irwine was still seated, leaning back in his
chair and stroking Juno's head, the servant came to the door
and said, " If ycu please, sir, Joshua Rann wishes to speak
with you, if you're at liberty."

" Let him be shown in here," said Mrs. Irwine, taking up
her knitting. " I always like to hear what Mr. Rann has got
to say. His shoes will be dirty, but see that he wipes them,
Carrol."

In two minutes Mr. Rann appeared at the door with very
deferential bows, which, however, were far from conciliating
Pug, who gave a sharp bark, and ran across the room to rec-
onnoitre the stranger's legs ; while the two puppies, regard-

52 ADAM BEDS.

ing Mr, Rann's prominent calf and ribbed worsted stockings
from a more sensuous point of view, plunged and growled over
them in great enjoyment. Meantime, Mr. Irwine turned round
his chair and said,

" Well, Joshua, anything the matter at Hayslope, that
you've come over this morning? Sit down, sit down. Never
mind the dogs ; give them a friendly kick. Here, Pug, you
rascal ! "

It is very pleasant to see some men turn round ; pleasant
as a sudden rush of warm air in winter, or the flash of fire-
light in the chill dusk. Mr. Irwine was one of those men.
He bore the same sort of resemblance to his mother that our
loving memory of a friend's face often bears to the face itself ;
the lines were all more generous, the smiles brighter, the ex-
pression heartier. If the outline had been less finely cut, his
face might have been called jolly ; but that was not the right
word for its mixture of bonhommie and distinction.

" Thank your reverence," answered Mr. Rann, endeavor-
ing to look unconcerned about his legs, but shaking them al-
ternately to keep off the puppies ; " I'll stand, if you please,
as more becoming. I hope I see you and Mrs. Irwine
well, an' Miss Irwine — an' Miss Anne, I hope's as well as
usual."

" Yes, Joshua, thank you. You see how blooming my
mother looks. She beats us younger people hollow. But
what's the matter ? "

" Why, sir, I had to come to Brox'on to deliver some
work, and I thought it but right to call and let you know the
goin's-on as there's been i' the village, such as I hanna seen
i' my time, and I've lived in it man and boy sixty year come
St. Thomas, and collected the Easter dues for Mr. Blick be-
fore your reverence come into the parish, and been at the
ringin' o' every bell, and the diggin' o' every grave, and
sung i' the quire long afore Bartle Massey come from nobody
knows where, wi' his counter-singin' and fine anthems, as puts
everybody out but himself — one takin' it up after another
like sheep a-bleatin' i' the fould. I know what belongs to
bein' a parish clerk, and I know as I should be wantin' i'
respect to your reverence, an' church, an' king, if I was t'
allow such goin's-on wi'out speakin'. I was took by surprise,
an' knowed nothin' on it beforehand, an' I was so flustered, I
was clean as if I'd lost my tools. I hanna slep more than
four hour this night as is' past an' gone ; an' then it was
nothin' but nightmare, as tired me worse nor walkin'."

ADAM BEDE.

" Why, what in the world is the matter, Joshua ? Have
the thieves been at the church lead again ? "

" Thieves ! no, sir — an' yet, as I may say, it is thieves,
an' a-thievin' the church too. It's the Methodisses as is like
to get th' upper hand i' th' parish, if your reverence an' his
honor, Squire Donnithorne, doesna think well to say the word
an' forbid it. Not as I'm a dictatin' to you sir ; I'm not
forgettin' myself so far as to be wise above my betters.
Howiver, whether I'm wise or no, that's neither here nor
there, but what I've got to say I say — as the young Methodis
woman, as is at Mester Poyser's, was a-preachin' an' a-prayin'
on the Green last night, as sure as I'm a stannin' afore your
reverence now."

" Preaching on the Green ! " said Mr. Irwine, looking
surprised, but quite serene. " What, that pale, pretty young
woman I've seen at Poyser's ? I saw she was a Methodist,
or Quaker, or something of that sort, by her dress, but I
didn't know she was a preacher."

" It's a true word as I say, sir," rejoined Mr. Rann, com-
pressing his mouth into a semicircular form, and pausing long
enough to indicate three notes of exclamation. " She preached
on the Green last night ; an' she's laid hold o' Chad's Bess,
as the girl's been i' fits welly iver sin'."

" Well, Bessy Cranage is a hearty-looking lass ; I dare
say she'll come round again, Joshua. Did anybody else go
into fits ? "

" No, sir, I canna say as they did. But there's no knowin'
what'll come, if we're t' have such preachin's as that a-goin'
on ivery week ; there'll be no livin' i' the village. For them
Methodisses make folks believe as they take a mug o' drink
extry, an' make theirselves a bit comfortable, they'll have to
go to hell for't as sure as they're born. I'm not a tipplin'
man nor a drunkard — nobody can say it on me — but I like a
extry quart at Easter or Christmas time, as is nat'ral when
we're goin' the rounds a-singin' an' folks ofifer't you for
nothin' ; or when I'm a collectin' the dues ; an' I like a pint,
wi' my pipe, an' a neighborly chat at Mester Casson's now
and then, for I was brought up i' the Church, thank God, an'
ha' been a parish clerk this two an' thirty year ; I should
know what the Church religion is."

"Well, what's your advice, Joshua? What do you think
should be done ? "

" Well, your reverence, I'm not for takin' any measures
again' the young woman. She's well enough if she'd let alone

ADAM BEDE.

preachin', an' I hear as she's a-goin' away back to her own
country soon. She's Mr. Po3'ser's own niece, an' 1 donna^
wish to say what's any ways disrespectful o' th' family at th'
Hall Farm, as I've measured for shoes, little an' big, welly
iver sin' I've been a shoemaker. But there's that Will Mask-
ery, sir, as is the rampageousest Methodis as can be, an' I
make no doubt it was him as stirred up th' young woman to
preach last night, an' he'll be a-bringin' other folks to preach
from Treddles'on, if his comb isn't cut a bit; an' I think as
he should be let know as he isna t' have the makin' an'
mendin' o' church carts an' implemen's, let alone stayin' i'
that house and yard as is Squire Donnithorne's."

"Well, but you say yourself, Joshua, that you never knew
any one come to preach on the Green before ; why should
you think they'll come again ? The Methodists don't come
to preach in little villages like Haysiope, where there's only
a handful of laborers, too tired to listen to them. They
might almost as well go and preach on the Binton ii'iUs.
Will Maskery is no preacher himself, I think."

"Nay, sir, he's no gift at stringin' the words together
wi'out book ; he'd be stuck fast like a cow i' wet clay. But
he's got tongue enough to speak disrespectful about's neebors,
for he said as I was a blind Pharisee — a-usin' the Bible i'
that way to find nicknames for folks as are his elders an'
betters ! and, what's worse, he's been heard to say very un-
becomin' words about your reverence ; for I could bring them
as 'ud swear as he called you a ' dumb dog ' an' a ' idle
shepherd.' You'll forgi'e me for sayin' such things over again."

" Better not, better not, Joshua. Let evil words die as
soon as they're spoken. Will Maskery might be a great deal
worse fellow than he is. He used to be a wild, drunken
rascal, neglecting his work and beating his wife, they told
me ; now he's thrifty and decent, and he and his wife look
comfortable together. If you can bring me any proof that
he interferes with his neighbors, and creates any disturbance,
I shall think it my duty as a clergyman and a magistrate to
interfere. But it wouldn't become . wise people, like you
and me, to be making a fuss about trifles, as if we thought
the Church was in danger because Will Maskery lets his
tongue wag rather foolishly, or a young woman talks in a
serious wav to a handful of people on the Green. We must
'live and let live,' Joshua, in religion as well as in other
things. You go on doing your duty, as parish clerk and
sexton, as well as you've always done it, and making those

ADAM BEDE.

capital thick boots for your neighbors, and things won't go
far wrong in Hayslope, depend upon it."

" Your reverence is very good to say so ; an' I'm sensible
as, you not livin' i' the parish, there's more upo' my shoul-
ders."

" To be sure \ and you must mind and not lower the
Church in people's eyes by seeming to be frightened about it
for a little thing, Joshua. I shall trust to your good sense,
now, to take no notice at all of what Will Maskery says,
either about you or me. You and your neighbors can go on
taking your pot of beer soberly, when you've done your day's
work, like good Churchmen ; and if Will Maskery doesn't
like to join you, but to go to a prayer-meeting at Treddleston
instead, let him ; that's no business of yours, so long as he
doesn't hinder you from doing what you like. And as to
people saying a few idle words about us, we must not mind
that, any more than the old church steeple minds the rooks
cawing about it. Will Maskery comes to church every Sun-
day afternoon, and does his wheelwright's business steadily
in the week days, and as long as he does that he must be let
alone."

"Ah! sir, but when he comes to church, he sits an'
shakes his head, an' looks as sour an' as coxy when we're
a-singin', as I should like to fetch him a rap across the jowl
— God forgi'e me — an' Mrs. Irwine, an' your reverence, too,
for speakin' so afore you. An' he said as our Christmas
singin' was no better nor the cracklin' o' thorns under a pot."

" Well, he's got a bad ear for music, Joshua. When peo-
ple have wooden heads, you know, it can't be helped. He
won't bring the other people in Hayslope round to his opinion
while you go on singing as well as you do."

"Yes, sir ; but it turns a man's stomach t' hear the Scrip-
ture misused i' that way. I know as much o' the words o'
the Bible as he does, an' could say the Psalms right through
i' my sleep if you was to pinch me ; but I know better nor to
take 'em to say my own say wi'. I might as well take the
Sacriment-cup home and use it at meals."

"That's a very sensible remark of yours, Joshua; but, as
I said before — "

While Mr. Irwine was speaking, the sound of a booted
step and the clink of a spur were heard on the stone floor of
the entrance-hall, and Joshua Rann moved hastily aside from
the doorway to make room for some one who paused there,
and said, in a ringing tenor voice,

ADAM BEDE.

" Godson Arthur ; may he come in ? "

" Come in, come in, godson ! " Mrs. Irwine answered, in
the deep half-mascuhne tone which belongs to the vigorous
old woman, and there entered a young gentleman in a riding-
dress, with his right arm in a sling ; whereupon followed
that pleasant confusion of laughing interjections, and hand-
shakings, and " How are you's ? " mingled with joyous short
barks and wagging of tails on the part of the canine members
of the family, which tells that che visitor is on the best terms
with the visited. The young gentleman was Arthur Donni-
thorne, known in Hayslope, variously, as "the young squire,"
" the heir," and " the captain." He was only a captain in
the Loamshire Militia; but to the Hayslope tenants he was
more intensely a captain than all the young gentlemen of the
same rank in his majesty's regulars ; he outshone them as
the planet Jupiter outshines the Milky Way. If you want to
know more particularly how he looked, call to your remem-
brance some tawny-whiskered, brown-locked, clear-complex-
ioned young Englishman whom you have met with in a foreign
town, and been proud of as a fellow-countryman — well-
washed, high-bred, white-handed, yet looking as if he could
deliver well from the left shoulder, and floor his man ; I will
not be so much of a tailor as to trouble your imagination
with the difference of costume, and insist on the striped
waistcoat, long-tailed coat, and low top-boots.

Turning round to take a chair. Captain Donnithorne said,
" But don't let me interrupt Joshua's business — he has some-
thing to say."

" Humbly begging your honor's pardon," said Joshua, bow-
ing low, " there was one thing I had to say to his reverence
as other things had drove out o' my head."

" Out with it, Joshua, quickly ! " said Mr. Irwine.

" Belike, sir, you havena heard as Thias Bede's dead —
drownded this morning, or more like over night, i' the Wil-
low Brook, again' the bridge right i' front o' the house."

" Ah ! " exclaimed both the gentlemen at once, as if they
were a good deal interested in the information.

" An' Seth Bede's been to me this morning to say he wished
me to tell your reverence as his brother Adam begged of you
particular t' allow his father's grave to be dug by the White
Thorn, because his mother's set her heart on it, on account of
a dream as she had ; an' they'd ha come theirselves to ask
you, but they've so much to see after with the crowner an'
that ; an' their mother's took on so, an' wants 'em to make

ADAM BEDE. 57

sure o' the spot for fear somebody else should take it. An' if
your reverence sees well and good, I'll send my boy to tell
■'em as soon as 1 get home ; an' that's why I make bold to
trouble you wi' it, his honor being present."

"To' be sure, Joshua, to be sure, they shall have it. I'll
ride round to Adam myself, and see him. Send your boy,
however, to say they shall have the grave, lest any thing should
happen to detain me. And now, good-morning, Joshua ; go
into the kitchen and have some ale."

" Poor old Thias ! " said Mr. Irwine, when Joshua was
gone. " I'm afraid the drink helped the brook to drown him.
I should have been glad for the load to have been taken off
my friend Adam's shoulders in a less painful way. That fine
fellow has been propping up his father from ruin for the last
five or six years."

" He's a regular trump, is Adam," said Captain Donni-
thorne. " When I was a little fellow, and Adam was a strap-
ping lad of fifteen, and taught me carpentering, I used to think
if ever I was a rich sultan, I would make Adam my grand-
vizier. And I believe now, he would bear the exaltation as
well as any poor wise man in an Eastern story. If ever I live
to be a large-acred man, instead of a poor devil, with a mort-
gaged allowance of pocket-mone3% I'll have Adam for my
right-hand. He shall manage my woods for me, for he seems
to have a better notion of those things than any man I ever
met with ; and I know he would make twice the money of
them that my grandfather does with that miserable old
Satcbell to manage, who understands no more about tim-
ber than an old carp. I've mentioned the subject to my
grandfather once or twice, but for some reason or other he
has a dislike to Adam, and / can do nothing. But come,
your reverence, are you for a ride with me ? It's splendid
out of doors now. We can go to Adam's together, if you like
it ; but I want to call at the Hall Farm on my way, to look
at the whelps Poyser is keeping for me."

"You must stay and have lunch first, Arthur," said Mrs.
Irwine. "It's nearly two. Carrol will bring it in directly."

" I want to go to the Hall Farm too," said Mr. Irwine,
" to have another look at the little Methodist who is staying
there. Joshua tells me she was preaching on the Green last
night."

" Oh, bv Jove ! " said Captain Donnithorne, laughing.
" Whv, she looks as quiet as a mouse. There's something
rather striking about her though. I positively felt quite bash-

5$ ADAM BEDE.

ful the first time I saw her ; she was sitting stooping over her
sewing in the sunshine outside the house, when I rode up and
called out, without noticing that she was a stranger, ' Is Mar-
tin Poyser at home ? ' I declare, when she got up and looked
at me, and just said, ' He's in the house, I believe ; Til go
and call him,' 1 felt quite ashamed of having spoken so ab-
ruptly to her. She looked like St. Catherine in a Quaker
dress. It's a type of a face one rarely sees among our com-
mon people."

"I should like to see the young woman, Dauphin," said
Mrs. Irwine. " Make her come here on some pretext or
other."

" I don't know how I can manage that, mother ; it will
hardly do for me to patronize a Methodist preacher, even if
she would consent to be patronized by an idle shepherd, as
Will Maskery calls me. You should have come in a little
sooner, Arthur, to hear Joshua's denunciation of his neighbor
Will Maskery, The old fellow wants me to excommunicate
the wheelwright, and then deliver him over to the ci\il arm —
that is to say, to your grandfather — to be turned out of house
and yard. If I chose to interfere in this business now, I might
get up as pretty a story of hatred and persecution as the
Methodists need desire to publish in the next number of their
Magazine. It wouldn't take me much trouble to persuade
Chad Cranage and half a dozen other bull-headed fellows,
that they would be doing an acceptable service to the Church
by hunting Will Maskery out of the village with rope-ends and
pitchforks ; and then, when I had furnished them with half a
sovereign to get gloriously drunk after their exertions, I
should have put the climax to as pretty a farce as any of my
brother clergy have set going in their parishes for the last
thirty years."

" It is really insolent of the man, though, to call you an
'idle shepherd,' and a 'dumb dog,'" said Mrs. Irwine; " 1
should be inclined to check him a little there. You're too
easy-tempered, Dauphin."

" Why, mother, you don't think it would be a good way of
sustaining my dignity to set about vindicating myself from the
aspersions of Will Maskery? Besides, I'm not so sure that
they c?/-*? aspersions. I am a lazy fellow, and get terribly heavy
in my saddle ; not to mention that I'm always spending more
than I can afford in bricks and mortar, so that I get savage at
a lame beggar when he asks me for sixpence. Those poor
lean cobblers, who think they can help to regenerate mankind

ADAM BEDE.

by setting out to preach in the morning twilight before they
begin their day's work, may well have a poor opinion of me.
But come, let us have our luncheon. Isn't Kate coming to
lunch?"

" Miss Irwine told Bridget to take her lunch up stairs,"
said Carrol ; '" she can't leave Miss Anne."

" Oh, very well. Tell Bridget to say I'll go up and see
Miss Anne presently. You can use your right arm quite well
now, Arthur," Mr. Irwine continued, observing that Captain
Donnithorne had taken his arm out of the sling.

" Yes, pretty well ; but Godwin insists on my keeping it
up constantly for some time to come. I hope I shall be able
to get away to the regiment, though, in the beginning of
August. It's a desperately dull business being shut up at the
chase in the summer months, when one can neither hunt nor
shoot, so as to make one's self pleasantly sleepy in the evcii-
ing. However, we are to astonish the echoes on the 30th of
July. My grandfather has given me carte blanche for onc(;,
and I promise you the entertainment shall be worthy of the
occasion. The world will see the grand epoch of my major-
ity twice. I think I shall have a lofty throne for you, god-
mamma, or rather two, one on the lawn and another in the
ball room, that you may sit and look down upon us like an
Olympian goddess."

" I mean to bring out my best brocade, that I wore at your
christening twenty years ago," said Mrs. Irwme. "Ah, I
think I shall see your poor mother flitting about in her white
dress, w-hich looked to me almost like a shroud that very day ;
and it was\\(t\ shroud only three months after; and your little
cap and christening dress were buried with her too. She had
set her heart on that, sweet soul ! Thank God you take after
your mother's family, Arthur ! If you had been a puny, wiry,
yellow baby, I wouldn't have stood godmother to you. I
should have been sure you would turn out a Donnithorne.
But you were such a broad-faced, broad-chested, loud-scream-
ing rascal, I knew you were every inch of j'ou a Tradgett."

'• But you mi.ht have been a little too hasty there, mother,"
said Mr. Irwine, smiling. '• Don't you remember how it was
with Juno's last pups? One of them was tiie ver}- image of
its mothenbut it had two or three of its father's tricks not-
withstandmg. Nature is clever enough to cheat even you,
mother."

" Nonsense, child ! Nature never makes a ferret in the
shape of a mastiff. You'll never persuade me that \ can't teli

6o ADAM BEDE.

what men are by their outsides. If I don't like a man's looks,
depend upon it I shall never like him. I don't want to know
people that look ugly and disagreeable, any more than I want
to taste dishes that look disagreeable. If they make me shud-
der at the first glance, I say, take them away. An ugly, pig-
gish, or fishy eye, now, makes me feel quite ill ; it's like a bad
smell."

"Talking of eyes," said Captain Donnithorne, "that re-
minds me that I have got a book I meant to bring you, god-
mamma. It came down in a parcel from London the other
day. I know you are fond of queer, wizard-like stories. It's
a volume of poems, ' Lyrical Ballads ; ' most of them seem to
be twaddling stuff ; but the first is in a different style — ' The
Ancient Mariner ' is the title. I can hardly make head or tail
of it as a story, but it's a strange, striking thing. I'll send it
over to you ; and there are some other books that you may
like to see, Irwine — pamphlets about Antinomianism and
Evangelicalism, whatever they may be. I can't think what
the fellow means by sending such things to me. I have writ-
ten to him to desire that from henceforth he will send me no
book or pamphlet on any thing that ends in w«."

" Well, I don't know that I'm very fond of isms myself ; but
I may as well look at the pamphlets ; they let one see what is
going on. Iv'e a little matter to attend to, Arthur," con-
tinued Mr. Irwine, rising to leave the room, " and then I shall
be ready to set out with you."

The little matter that Mr. Irwine had to attend to took
him up the old stone staircase (part of the house was very
old), and made him pause before a door at which he knocked
gently. " Come in," said a woman's voice, and he entered a
room so darkened by blinds and curtains that Miss Kate, the
thin middle-aged lady standing by the bedside, would not have
had light enough for any other sort of work than the knitting
which lay on the little table near her. But at present she was
doing what required only the dimmest light — sponging the
aching head that lay on the pillow with fresh vinegar. It was
a small face, that of the poor sufferer ; perhaps it had once
been pretty, but now it was worn and sallow. Miss Kate
came toward her brother and whispered, " Don't speak to
her; she can't bear to be spoken to to-day." Anne's eyes
were closed, and her brow contracted as if from intense pain.
Mr. Irwine went to the bedside, and took up one of the deli-
cate hands and kissed it ; a slight pressure from the small
fingers told him that it was worth while to have come up stairs

ADAM BEDE. 6 1

for the sake of doing that. He lingered a moment, looking
at her, and then turned away and left the room, treading very
gently — he had taken off his boots and put on slippers before
he came up stairs. Whoever remembers how many things he
has declined to do even for himself, rather than have the
trouble of putting on or taking off his boots, will not think
this last detail insignificant.

And Mr. Irwine's sisters, as any person of family within
ten miles of Broxton could have testified, were such stupid,
uninteresting women ! It was quite a pity handsome, clever
Mrs. Irwine should have had such commonplace daughters.
I'hat fine old lady herself was worth driving ten miles to see,
any day ; her beauty, her well-preserved faculties, and her
old-fashioned dignity, made her quite a graceful subject for
conversation in turn with the king's health, the sweet new
patterns in cotton dresses, the news from Egypt, and Lord
Dacey's law-suit, which was fretting poor Lady Dacey to death.
But no one ever thought of mentioning the Miss Irwines, ex-
cept the poor people in Broxton village, who regarded them
as deep in the science of medicine, and spoke of them vaguely
as " the gentlefolks." If any one had asked old Job Dum.
milow who gave him his flannel jacket, he would have
answered, " The gentlefolks, last winter ; " and Widow Steene
dwelt much on the virtues of the " stuff '' the gentlefolks
gave her for her cough. Under this name, too, they were
used with great effect as a means of taming refractory children,
so that at the sight of poor Miss Anne's sallow face, several
small urchins had a terrified sense that she was cognizant of
all their worst misdemeanors, and knew the precise numbei
of stones with which they had intended to hit Farmer Britton's
ducks. But for all who saw them through a less mythical
medium, the Miss Irwines were quite superfluous existences —
hiartistic figures, crowding the canvas of life without adequate
effect. Miss Anne, if her chronic headaches could have been
accounted for by a pathetic story of disappointed love, might
have had some romantic interest attached to her • but no
such story had either been known or invented concerning her,
and the general impression was quite in accordance with the
fact that both the sisters were old maids for the prosaic
reason that they had never received an eligible offer.

Nevertheless, to speak paradoxically, the existence of in-
significant people has very important consequences in the
world. It can be shown to affect the price of bread and the
rate of wages, to c»H forth manv evil tempers from the selfish,

62 ADAM BEDE.

and many heroisms from the sympathetic, and in other ways
to play no small part in the tragedy or life. And if that hand-
some, generous-blooded clergyman, the Rev. Adolphus Irvvine,
had not had these two hopelessly-maiden sisters, his lot would
hav-3 been shaped quite differently : he would very likely have
taken a comely wife in his j^outh, and now, when his hair was
getting gray under the powder, would hav^e had tall sons and
blooming daughters — such possessions, in short, as men com-
monly think will repay them for all the labor they take under
the sun. As it was — having with all his three livings no more
than seven hundred a year, and seeing no way of keping his
splendid mother and his sickly sister, not to reckon a second
sister, who was usually spoken of without any adjective, in
such ladj'-like ease as became their birth and habits, and at
the same time of providing for a family of his own — he re-
mained, 3-ou see, at the age of eight-and-forty, a bachelor, not
making any merit of that renunciation, but saying, laughingly,
if any one alluded to it, that he made it an excuse for many
indulgences which a wife would never have allowed him. And
perhaps he was the only person in the world who did not
think his sisters uninteresting and superfluous ; for his was
one of those large-hearted, sweet-blooded natures that never
know a narrow or a grudging thought — epicurean, if you will
— with no enthusiasm, no self-scourging sense of duty ; but yet,
as you have seen, of a sufficiently subtle moral fibre to have
an unwearying tenderness for obscure and monotone suffering.
It was his large-hearted indulgence that made him ignore his
mother's hardness toward her daughters, which was the more
striking from its contrast with her doting fondness toward
himself ; he held it no virtue to frown at irremediable faults.
See the difference between the impression a man makes
on you when you walk by his side in familiar talk, or look at
him in his home, and the fugure he makes when seen from a
lofty historical level, or even in the eyes of a critical neighbor
who thinks of him as an embodied system or opinion rather
tlian as a man. Mr. Roe, the " travelling preacher " stationed
at Treddleston, had included Mr. Irwine in a general state-
ment concerning the church clergy in the surrounding district,
whom he described as men given up to the lusts of the flesh
and the pride of life ; hunting and shooting, and adorning
their own houses ; asking what shall we eat, and what shall
we drink, and wherewithal shall we be clothed ? — careless of
dispensing the bread of life to their flocks, preaching at best
but a carnal and soul-benumbing morality, and trafficking in

ADAM BEDE. (5^

the souls of men by receiving money for discharging the pas-
toral office in parishes where they did not so much as look on
the f^ces of the people more than once a year. The eccle-
siastical historian, too, looking into parliamentary reports of
that period, finds honorable members zealous for the Church,
and untainted with any sympathy for the " tribe of canting
jNIethodists," making statements scarcely less melancholy than
that of Mr. Roe. And it is impossible for me to say that Mr.
Irwine was altogether belied by the generic classification as-
signed him. He really had no very lofty aims, no theological
enthusiasm ; if I were closely questioned, I should be obliged
to confess that he felt no serious alarms about the souls of
his parishoners, and would have thought it a mere loss of
time to talk in a doctrinal and awakening manner to old
" Feyther Taft," or even to Chad Cranage the blacksmith.
If he had been in the habit of speaking theoretically, he would,
perhaps, have said that the only healthy form religion could
take in such minds was that of certain dim but strong emo-
tions, suffusing themselves as a hallowing influence over the
family affections and neighborly duties. He thought the
custom of baptism more important than its doctrine, and that
the religious benefits the peasant drew from the church where
his father worshipped and the sacred piece of turf where they
lay buried, were but slightly dependent on a clear understand-
ing of the Liturgy or the sermon. Clearly, the rector was
not what is called in these days an " earnest " man : he was
fonder of church history than of divinity, and had much more
insight into men's characters than interest in their opinions,
he was neither laborious, nor obviously self-denying, nor very
copious in alms-giving, and his theologv, you perceive, was
lax. His mental palate, indeed, was rather pa^an, and found
a savoriness in a quotation from Sophocles or Theocritus that
was quite absent from any text in Isaiah or Amos. But if
you feed our young setter on raw flesh,. how can you wonder
on its retaining a relish for uncooked jDartridge in after lite ?
and Mr. Irwine's recollections of young enthusiasm and am-
bition were all associated with poetry and ethics that lay aloof
from the Bible.

On the other hand, I must plead, for I have an aft'ectionate
partiality toward the rector's memory, that he was not vindic-
tive— and some philanthropists have been so ; that he was not
intolerant — and there is a rumor that some theolos^ians have
not been altogether free from that blemish ; that, although he
"would probably have declined to give his body to be burned

64- ADAAf BEDE.

in any public cause, and he was far from bestowing all his
goods to feed the poor, he had that charity which has some:
times been lacking to very illustrious virtue — he was fender
to other men's failings, and unwilling to impute evil. He was
one of those men, and they are not the commonest, of whom
we can know the best only by following them away from the
market-place, the platform, and the pulpit, entering with them
into their own homes, hearing the voice with which they speak
to the young and aged about their own hearthstone, and wit-
nessing their thoughtful care for the every-day wants of every-
day companions, who take all their kindness as a matter of
course, and not as a subject for panegyric.

Such men, happily, have lived in times when great abuses
flourished, and have sometimes even been the living repre-
sentatives of the abuses. That is a thought which might
comfort us a little under the opposite fact — that it is better
sometimes not to follow great reformers of abuses beyond the
threshold of their homes.

But, whatever you may think of Mr. Irwine now, if you
had met him that June afternoon riding on his gray cob, with
his dogs running beside him — portly, upright, manly, with a
good-natured smile on his finely-turned lips as he talked to
his dashing young companion on the bay mare, you must have
felt that, however ill he harmonized with sound theories of
the clerical ofBce, he somehow harmonized extremely well
with that peaceful landscape.

See them in the bright sunlight, interrupted every now
and then by rolling masses of cloud, ascending the slope from
the Broxton side, where the tall gables and elms of the Rec-
tory predominate over the tiny whitewashed church. They
will soon be in the parish of Hayslope ; the gray church-
tower and village roofs lie before them to the left, and farther
on, to the right, they can just see the chimneys of the Hall
Farm.

ADAM BEDE 5^

CHAPTER VI,

THE HALL FARM.

Evidently that orate is never opened ; for the long grass
and the great hemlocks grow close against it ; and if it were
opened, it is so rusty that the force necessary to turn it on
its hinges would be likely to pull down the square stone-pillars,
to the detriment of the two stone lionesses which grin, with
a doubtful carnivorous affability, above a coat of arms sur-
mounting each of the pillars. It would be easy enough, by
the aid of the nicks in the stone pillars, to climb over the
brick wall, with its smooth stone coping ; but by putting our
eyes close to the rusty bars of the gate we can see the old
house well enough, and all but the very corners of the grassy
enclosure.

It is a very fine old place, of red brick, softened by a
pale powdery lichen which has dispersed itself with happy
irregularity, so as to bring the red brick into terms of friendly
companionship with the limestone ornaments surrounding the
three gables, the windows, and the door-place But the win-
dows are patched with wooden panes, and the door, I think,
is like the gate — it is never opened ; how it would groan and
grate against the stone floor if it were ! For it is a solid,
heavy, handsome door and must once have been in the habit
of shutting with a sonorous bang behind a liveried lackey,
who had just seen his master and mistress off the grounds in
a carriage and pair.

But at present one might fancy the house in the early stage
of a chancery suit, and that the fruit from that grand 'double
row of walnut-trees on the right hand of the enclosure would
fall and rot among the grass, if it were not that we heard the
booming bark of dogs echoing from great buildings at the back.
And now the half-weaned calves that have been sheltering
themselves in a gorse-built hovel against the left-hand wall
come out and set up a silly answer to that terrible bark,
doubtless supposing that it has reference to buckets of milk.

Yes, the house must be inhabited, and we will see by
whom, for imagination is a licensed trespasser; it has no fear
of dogs, but may climb over walls and peep in at windows
with impunity. Put your face to one of the glass panes in the
right-hand window ; what do you see } A large open fireplace.

C6 ADAM BEDE.

with rusty dogs in it, and a bare-boarded floor ; at the far end
fleeces of wool stacked up ; in the middle of the floor some
empty corn-bags. That is the furniture of the dining-room.
And what through the left-hand window ? Several clothes-
horses, a pillion, a spinning-wheel, and an old box, wide open,
and stuffed full of colored rags. At the edge of this box there
lies a great wooden doll, which, so far as mutilation is con-
cerned, bears a strong resemblance to the finest Greek sculpt-
ure, and especially in the total loss of its nose. Near it there
is a little chair, and the butt end of a boy's leather long-lashed
whip.

The history of the house is plain now. It was once the
residence of a country squire, whose family, probably dwindling
dov/n to mere spinsterhood, got merged into the more territo-
rial name of Donnithorne. It was once the Hall ; it is now
the Hall Farm. Like the life in some coast-town that was
once a watering-place and is now a port, where the genteel
streets are silent and grass-grown, and the docks and ware-
houses busy and resonant, the life at the Hall has changed
its focus, and no longer radiates from the parlor, but from the
kitchen and the farm-yard.

Plenty of life there ! though this is the drowsiest time
of the year, just before hay-harvest ; and it is the drowsiest
time of the day too, for it is close upon three by the sun, and
it is half-past three by Mrs. Poyser's handsome eight-day
clock. But there is always a stronger sense of life when the
sun is brilliant after rain ; and now he is pouring down his
beams, and making sparkles among the wet straw, and light-
ing up every patch of vivid green moss on the red tiles of the
cow-shed, and turning even the muddy water that is hurrying
along the channel to the drain into a mirror for the yellow-
billed ducks, who are seizing the opportunity of getting a drink
with as much bodyjn it as possible. There is quite a concert
of noises ; the great bull-dog, chained against the stables, is
thrown into furious exasperation by the unwary approach of
a cock too near the mouth of his kennel, and sends forth a
thundering bark, which is answered by two fox-hounds shut
up in the opposite cow-house ; the old top-knotted hens scratch-
ing with their chicks among the straw, set up a sympathetic
croaking as the discomfited cock joins them ; a sow vv'th her
brood, all very muddy as to the legs, and curled as to the
tail, throws in some deep staccato notes ; our friends the
calves are bleating from the home croft ; and, under all, a
fine ear discerns the continuous hum of human voices.

ADAM BEDE. 67

For the great barn-doors are thrown wide open, and men
are busy there mending the harness, under the superintend-
ence of Mr. Goby, the "whittaw," otherwise saddler, who en-
tertains them with th latest Treddleston gossip. It is cer-
tainly rather an unfortunate day that Alick, the shepherd, has
chosen for having the whittaws, since the morning turned out
so wet ; and Mrs. Poyser has spoken her mind pretty strongly
as to the dirt which the extra number of men's shoes brought
into the house at dinner-time. Indeed she has not yet recov-
ered her equanimity on the subject, though it is now nearly
three hours since dinner, and the house-floor is perfectly clean
again — as clean as everything else in that wonderful house-
place, where the only chance of collecting a few grains of dust
would be to climb on the salt-coffer, and put your finger on
the high mantle-shelf on which the gUttering brass candlesticks
are enjoying their summer sinecure ; for at this time of year,
of course, every one goes to bed while it is yet light, or at
least light enough to discern the outline of objects after you
have bruised your shins against them. Surely nowhere else
could an oak clock-case and an oak table have got to such a
polish by the hand ; genuine "elbow-polish," as Mrs. Poyser
called it, for she thanked God she never had any of your var-
nished rubbish in her house. Hetty Sorrel often took the
opportunity, when her aunt's back was turned, of looking at
the pleasing reflection of herself in those polished surfaces,
for the oak table was usually turned up like a screen, and was
more for ornament than for use ; and she could see herself
sometimes in the great round pewter dishes that were ranged
on the shelves above the long deal dinner-table, or in the
hobs of the grate, which always shone like jasper.

Everything was looking at its brightest at this moment,
for the sun shone right on the pewter dishes, and from their
reflecting surfaces pleasant jets of light were thrown on mel-
low oak and bright brass ; and on a still pleasanter object than
these, for some of the rays fell on Dinah's finely-moulded
cheek, and lit up her pale red hair to auburn, as she bent over
the heavy household linen which she was mending for her
aunt. No scene could have been more peaceful il Mrs. Poy-
ser, who was ironing a few things that still remained from the
Monday's wash, had not been making a fr; -;i::ent clinking
with her iron, and moving to and fro whenever she wanted
it to cool ; carrying the keen glance of her blue-gray eye from
the kitchen to the dairy, where Hetty was making up the
butter, and from the dairy to the back kitchen, where Nancy

58 ADAM BEDR:

was taking the pies out of the oven. Do not suppose, however,
that Mrs. Poyser was elderly or shrewish in her appearance ;
she was a good-looking woman, not more than eight-and-thirty,
of fair complexion and sandy hair, well-sliapen, light-footed ;
the most conspicuous article in her attire was an ample
checkered linen apron, which almost covered her skirt; and
nothing could be plainer and less noticeable than her cap
and gown, for there was no weakness of which she was less
tolerant than feminine vanity, and the preference of ornament
to utility. The family likeness between her and her niece,
Dinah Morris, with the contrast between her keenness and
Dinah's seraphic gentleness of expression, might Lave served
a painter as an excellent suggestion for a Martha and Mary.
U'heir eyes were just of the same color, but a striking test of
the difference in their operation was seen in the demeanor of
Trip, the black and tan terrier, whenever that much-sus-
pected dog unwarily exposed himself to the freezing Arctic
ray of Mrs. Poyser's glance. Her tongue was not less keen
than her eye, and, whenever a damsel came within ear-
shot, seemed to take up an unfinished lecture, as a barrel-
organ takes up a tune, precisely at the point where it had
left off.

The fact that it was churning-day was another reason why
it was inconvenient to have the " whittaws," and why, conse-
quently, Mrs. Poyser should scold Molly the housemaid with
unusual severity. To all appearance, Molly had got through
her after-dinnerwork in an exemplary manner, had "cleaned
herself " with great dispatch, and now came to ask, submis-
sively, if she should sit down to her spinning till milking-
time. But this blameless conduct, according to Mrs. Poyser,
shrouded a secret indulgence of unbecoming wishes, which she
now dragged forth and held up to Molly's view with cutting
eloquence.

" Spinning, indeed ! It isn't spinning as you'd be at, I'll
be bound, and let you have your own way. I never knew
your equals for gallowsness. To think of a gell o' your age
wanting to go an sit with half a dozen men ! I'd ha' been
ashamed to let the words pass over my lips if I'd been you.
And you, as have been here ever since last Michaelmas, and
I hired you at Treddles'on stattits, without a bit o' charac-
ter— as I say, you might be grateful to be hired in that way
to a respectable place ; and you knew no more o' what be-
longs to work when you come here than the mawkin i' the
field. As poor a two-fisted thing as ever I saw, you know

ADAAf BEDE. c.^

you was. M'ho m.ught you to scrub a floor, I should like to
knowr Why you d leave the dirt in heaps i' the corners
—anybody ud think you'd never been brought up amoncr
Christians. Ana as for spjnnmg, why you've wasted as much
as your wage 1 the flax youVe spoiled learning to spin And
you ve a right to feel that, and not to go about gaping and as
thoughtless as if you was beholding to nobody. Comb the
wool for the whittaws, indeed ! That's what you'd like to be
doing is It > That's the way with you-that's the road you'd
all hke to go, headlongs to ruin. You're never eas'y till
Vnn7h-^?^ some sweetheart as is as big a fool as yourself.
You think you 11 be finely off when you're married, I dare say
and have got a three-legged stool to sit on, and never a
blanket to coyer you, and a bit o' oat-cake for your dinner
as three children are a snatching at." ' '

" I'm sure I donna want t' go wi' the whittaws," said
Mo!ly,_whinipering, and quite overcome by this Dantean pic-
ture or her future, " on'y we allays used to comb the wool
for n at Mester Otdey's ; an' so I just axed ye. I donna
Tttr^iVl d?"^^'^^ '''' ^"''^ '^^'"^"^^ ^Sain ; I wish I may never

at Mr. Ottley s. Your missis there might like her floors
dirtied wi whittaws, for what I know, there's no knowin-
what people wonna like— such ways as I've heard of I
never had a gell come into my house as seemed to know what
cleaning was ; I think people live like pigs, for my part
And as to that Betty as was dairy-maid at Trent's before she

week'f.T;'^''^^'' ''^; '^' "^^'^^^ "^^"^ turning from
wrote n. ''"'^ ' ^""^ ""^ ''"' ^^^'■y thralls, I mi|ht ha'

wrote my name on 'em, when I come down stairs after my ill-

Sof^v.^] ^^'^.'t'^'-'TT^ t ''?'' i"flan^n^ation-it was a me?cy I
gotten of It. And to thinko' your knowing no better Molly
and been here a-going i' nine months, and not for ^vant o'
talking to, neither— and what are you stanning there for like
vinV.f '' >■"" down, instead o' getting your wheel out.?

after ff'! .'"'" r °'' u"l"^ ^°'^'" ^° J^^"'" ^^°^k a little while
atter it s time to put by."

" Munny, my iron's twite told; pease put it down to

warm.

fronTi 1,>H. ^'^^'■'■"Pl^^/^'.^e that uttered this request came
seaTed n . l".""y-';^\'-^^ g'[l between three and four, who,
seated on a high chair at the end of the ironing-table, was
arduously clutching the handle of a miniature iron with he

ADAM BEDE.

tiny fat fist, and ironing rags with an assiduity that required
her to put her little red tongue out as far as anatomy would
allow.

" Cold, is it, my darling ? Bless your sweet face 1 " said
Mrs, Poyser, who was remarkable for the facility with which
she could relapse from her official objurgatory tone to one of
fondness or of friendly converse. " Never mind ! Mother's
done her ironing now. She's going to put the ironing things
away."

" Munny, I tould 'ike to do into de barn to Tommy, to
see de whittawd."

" No, no, no ; Totty 'ud get her feet wet," said Mrs. Poy-
ser, carrying away her iron. " Run into the dairy, and see
Cousin Hetty make the butter."

" I tould 'ike a bit o' pum-take," rejoined Totty, who
seemed to be provided with several relays of requests ; at the
same time, taking the opportunity of her momentary leisure
to put her fingers into a bowl of starch, and drag it down so
as to empty the contents with tolerable completeness on to
the ironing-sheet.

" Did ever anybody see the like ? " screamed Mrs. Poy-
ser, running toward the table when her eye had fallen on the
blue stream. " The child's allays i' mischief if your back's
turned a minute. What shall I do to you, you naughty,
naughty gell ! "

Totty, however, had descended from her chair with great
swiftness, and was already in retreat toward the dairy, with a
sort of waddling run, and an amount of fat on the nape of her
neck, which made her look like the metamorphosis of a white
sucking pig.

The starch having been wiped up by Molly's help, and the
ironing apparatus put by, Mrs. Poyser took up her knitting,
which always lay ready at hand, and was the work she liked
best, because she could carry it on automatically as she walked
to and fro. But now she came and sat down opposite Dinah,
whom she looked at in a meditative way, as she knitted her
gray worsted stocking.

" You look th' image o' your Aunt Judith, Dinah, when you
sit a-sewing. I could almost fancy it was thirty years back,
and I was a little gell at home, looking at Judith as she sat at
her work, after she'd done th' house up ; only it was a little
cottage, father's was, and not a big rambling house as gets
dirty i' one corner as fast as you can clean it in another ; but
for all that, I could fancy you was your Aunt Judith, only hef

ADAM BEDE.

hair was a deal darker than yours, and she was stouter and

broader i' the shoulders. Judith and me allays hung together,
though she had such queer ways, but your mother and her
never could agree. Ah ! your mother little thought as she'd
have a daughter just cut out after the very pattern o' Judith,
and leave her an orphan, too, for Judith to take care on, and
bring up with a spoon when she was in the grave-yard at
Stoniton. I allays said that o' Judith, as she'd bear a pound
weight any day, to save anybody else carrying a ounce. And
she was just the same from the first o' my remembering her ;
it made no difference in her, as I could see, when she took to
the Methodists, onlv she talked a bit different, and wore a dif-
ferent sort o' cap ; but she'd never in her life spent a penny
on herself more than keeping herself decent."

''She was a blessed woman," said Dinah; "God had
given her a loving, self-forgetting nature, and he perfected iv
by grace. And she was very fond of you too. Aunt Rachel.
I've often heard her talk of you in the same sort of way.
When she had that bad illness, and I was only eleven years
old, she used to say, ' You'll have a friend on earth in your
Aunt Rachel, if I'm taken away from you ; for she has a kind
heart ;' and I'm sure I've found it so.''

" I don't know how, child ; anybody 'ud be cunning to
do anything for you, I think ; you're like the birds o' th' air,
and live nobody knows how. I'd ha' been glad to behave to
you like a mother's sister, if you'd come and live i' this coun-
try, where there's some shelter and victual for man and beast,
and folks don't live on the naked hills, like poultry a-scratch-
ing on a gravel bank. And then you might get married to
some decent man, and there'd be plenty ready to have you, if
you'd only leave off that preaching, as is ten times worse
than anything your aunt Judith ever did. And even if you'd
marry Seth Bede, as is a poor wool-gathering Methodist,
and's never like to have a penny beforehand, I know your
uncle 'ud help you with a pig, and very like a cow, for he's
allays been good natur'd to my kin, for all they're poor, and
made 'em welcome to th' house ; and 'ud do for you, I'll be
bound, as much as ever he'd do for Hetty, though she's his
own niece. And there's linen in the house as I could well
spare you, for I've got lots o' sheeting, and table-clothing, and
toweling, as isn't made up. There's a piece o' sheeting I
could give you as that squinting Kitty spun — she was a rare
girl to spin, for all she squinted, and the children couldn't
abide her ; and, you know, the spinning's going on constant,

ADAM BEDS.

and there is new linen wove twice as fast as th'old wears out.
But where's the use o' talking, if you wonna be persuaded,
and settle down like any other woman in her senses, i'stead o'
wearing yourself out, with walking and preaching, and giving
away every penny you get, so as you've nothing saved against
sickness ; and all the things you've got i' the world, I verily
believe, 'ud go into a bundle no bigger nor a double cheese.
And all because you've got notions i' your head about religion
more nor what's i' the Catechism and the Prayer-book."

" But not more than what's in the Bible, aunt," said Dinah.

" Yes, and the Bible too, for that matter," Mrs. Poyser
rejoined, rather sharply ; " else why shouldn't them as know
best what's in the Bible — the parsons and people as have got
nothing to do but learn it — do the same as you do .'' But, for
the matter o' that, if everybody was to do like you, the world
must come to a stand-still ; for if everybody tried to do with-
out house and home, and with poor eating and drinking, and
was allays talking as we must despise the things o' the world,
as you say, I should like to know where the pick o' the stock,
and the corn, and the best new milk cheeses 'ud have to go .''
Everybody 'ud be wanting bread madeo' tail ends, and every-
body 'ud be running after everybody else to preach to 'em,
i'stead o' bringing up their families, and laying by against a
bad harvest. It stands to sense as that can't be the right
religion."

" Nay, dear aunt, you never heard me say that all people
are called to forsake their work and their families. It's quite
right the land should be plowed and sowed, and the precious
corn stored, and the things of this life cared for, and right
that people should rejoice in their families, and provide for
them, so that this is done in the fear of the Lord, and that
they are not unmindful of the soul's wants while they are car-
ing for the body. We can all be servants of God wJKrever
our lot is cast, but he gives us different sorts of work, accord-
ing as he fits us for it and calls us to it. I can no more help
spending my life in trying to do what I can for the souls of
others, than you could help running if you heard little Totty
crying at the other end of the house ; the voice would go to
your heart, you would think the dear child was in trouble or
in danger, and you couldn't rest without running to help her
and comfort her."

" Ah ! " said Mrs. Poyser, rising and walking toward the
door, " I know it 'ud be just the same if I was to talk to you
for hours. You'd make me the same answer at the end. I

ADAM BEDE. y^

might as well talk to the running brook, and tell it to stan'
still."

The causeway outside the kitchen door was dry enough
now for Mrs. Poyser to stand there quite pleasantly and see
what was going on in the yard, the gray worsted stocking
making a steady progress in her hands ail the while. But she
had not been standing there more than five minutes before
she came in again, and said to Dinah, in rather a flurried,
awe-stricken tone.

" If there isn't Captain Donnithorne and Mr. Irwine a-
coming into the yard ! I'll lay my life they're coming to
speak about your preaching on the Green, Dinah ; it's you
must answer 'em, for I'm dumb. I've said enough a'ready
about your bringing such disgrace upo' your uncle's family.
I wouldn't ha' minded if you'd been Mr. Poyser's own niece \
folks must put up wi' their own kin as they put up wi' their
own noses — it's their own flesh and blood. But to think of a
niece o' mine being cause o' my husband's being turned out
o' his farm, and me brought him no fortin but my savin's — "

" Nay, dear Aunt Rachel," said Dinah, gently, " you have
no cause for such fears. I've strong assurance that no evil
will happen to you and my uncle and the children from any-
thing I've done. I didn't preach without direction."

•' Direction ! I know very well what you mean by direc-
tion," said Mrs. Poyser, knitting in a rapid and agitated man-
ner. "When there's a bigger maggot than usual in your head
you call it ' direction,' and then nothing can stir you ; you
look like the statty o' the outside o' Treddles'on church,
a-starin' and a-smilin' whether it's fair weather or foul. I
hanna common patience with you."

By this time the two gentlemen had reached the palings,
and had got down from their horses : it was plain they meant
to come in. Mrs. Poyser advanced to the door to meet them,
curtseying low, and trembling between anger with Dinah and
anxiety to conduct herself with perfect propriety on the occa-
sion ; for in those days the keenest of bucolic minds felt a
whispering awe at the sight of the gentry, such as of old men
felt when they stood on the tip-toe to watch the gods passing
by in tall human shape.

" Well, Mrs. Poyser, how are you after this stormy morn-
ing ? " said Mr, Irwine, with his stately cordiality. " Our
feet are quite dry ; we shall not soil your beautiful floor."

"Oh, sir, don't mention it," said Mrs. Poyser. " Will you
and the captain please to walk into the parlor ? "

- - ADAM BEDE.

" No, indeed, thank you, Mrs. Poyser," said the captain,
looking eagerly around the kitchen, as if his eye were seeking
something it could not find. " I delight in your kitchen. 1
think it is the most charming room 1 know. I should like
every farmer's wife to come and look at it for a pattern."

" Oh, you're pleased to say so, sir ; pray, take a seat,"
said Mrs. Poyser, relieved a little by this compliment and the
captam's evident good-humor, but still glancing anxiously at
Mr. Irwine, who, she saw, was looking at Dinah and advanc-
ing toward her.

" Poyser is not at home, is he ? " said Captain Donni-
thorne, seating himself where he could see along the short
passage to the open dairy door.

*' No, sir, he isn't ; he's gone to Rosseter to see Mr.
West, the factor, about the wool. But there's father i' the
barn, sir, if he'd be of any use."

" No, thank yju ; I'll just look at the whelps, and leave a
message about them with your shepherd. I must come an-
other day and see your husband. I want to have a consulta-
tion with him about horses. Do you know when he's likely
to be at liberty ? "

" Why, sir, you can hardly miss him, except it's o' Tred-
dles'on market-day — that's of a Friday, you know ; for if he's
anywhere on the farm we can send for him in a minute. If
we'd got rid o' the Scantlands we should have no outlying
fields ; and I should be glad of it, for if ever anything hap-
pens he's sure to be gone to the Scantlands. Things allays
happens so contrairy, if they've a chance ; and it's an un-
nat'ral thing to have one bit o' your farm in one county and
all the rest in another."

" Ah ! the Scantlands would go much better with Cho3''ce's
farm, especially as he wants dairy-land and you've got plenty.
I think yours is the prettiest farm on the estate, though ; and
do you know, Mrs. Poyser, if I were going to marry and
settle I should be tempted to turn you out, and do up this
fine old house, and turn farmer myself."

" Oh, sir," said Mrs. Poyser, rather alarmed, " you
wouldn't like it at all. As for farming, it's putting money
into your pocket wi' your right hand and fetching it out wi'
your left. As fur as I can see, it's raising victual for other
folks, and just getting a mouthful for yourself and your chil-
dren as you go along. Not as you'd be like a poor man as
wants to get his bread ; you could afford to lose as much
money as you liked i' farming, but it's poor fun, losing money,

ADAM BEDE.

I should think, though I understan' it's what the great folks
i' London play at more than anything. For my husband
heard at market as Lord Dacey's eldest son had lost thou-
sands upo' thousands to the Prince of Wales, and they said
my lady was going to pawn her jewels to pay for them. But
you know more about that than I do, sir. But as for farming,
sir, I canna think as you'd like it ; and this house — the
draughts in it are enough to cut you through, and it's my
opinion the floors up stairs are very rotten, and the rats i' the
cellar are beyond anything."

" Why, that's a terrible picture, Mrs. Poyser. I think I
should be doing you a service to turn you out of such a place.
But there's no chance of that. I'm not likely to settle for
the next twenty years, till I'm a stout gentleman of forty ; and
my grandfather would never consent to part with such good
tenants as you."

" Well, sir, if he thinks so well of Mr. Poyser for a tenant,
I wish you could put in a word for him to allow us some new
gates for the Five closes, for my husband's been asking and
asking till he's tired, and to think o' what he's done for the
farm, and's never had a penny allowed him, be the times bad
or good. And, as I've said to my husband often and often,
I'm sure if the cap»:ain had anything to do with it, it wouldn't
be so. Not as I wish to speak disrespectful o' them as have
got the power i' their hands, but it's more than flesh and blood
'ull bear sometimes, to be toiling and striving, and up early
and down late, and hardly sleeping a wink when you lie down
for thinking as the cheese may swell, or the cows may slip
their calf, or the wheat may grow green again i' the sheaf ;
and, after all, at th' end o' the year, it's like as if you'd been
cooking a feast and had got the smell of it for your pains."

Mrs. Poyser, once launched into conversation, always
sailed along without any check from her preliminary awe of
the gentry. The confidence she felt in her own powers of
exposition was a motive force that overcame all resistance.

" I'm afraid I should only do harm instead of good if I
were to speak about the gates, Mrs. Poyser," said the captain,
"though I assure you there's no man on the estate I would
sooner say a word for than your husband. I know his farm
is in better order than any other within ten miles of us ; and
as for the kitchen," he added, smiling, " I don't believe there's
one in the kingdom to beat it. By the by, I've never seen
your dairy : I must see your dairy, Mrs. Poyser."

" Indeed, sir. it is not fit for you to go in, fpx^Hetty's in

76 ADAM BEDE.

the middle o' making the butter, for the churning was thrown
late, and I'm quite ashamed." This Mrs. Poyser said blush-
ing, and believing that the captain was really interested in her
milk-pans, and would adjust his opinion of her to the appear-
ance of her dairy.

" Oh, I've no doubt it's in capital order. Take me in,"
said the captain, himself leading the way, while Mrs. Poyser
iollowed.

CHAPTER VII.

THE DAIRY.

The dairy was certainly worth looking at: it was a scene
to sicken for with a sort of calenture in hot and dusty streets
— such coolness, such purity, such fresh fragrance of new-
pressed cheese, of firm butter, of wooden vessels perpetually
bathed in pure water; such soft coloring of red earthenware
and creamy surfaces, brown wood and polished tin, gray lime-
stone and rich orange-red rust on the iron weights, and hooks,
and hinges. But one gets only a confused notion of these de-
tails when they surround a distractingly pretty girl of seven-
teen, standing on little pattens and rounding her dimpled arm
to lift a pound of butter out of the scale.

Hetty blushed a deep rose-color when Captain Donnithorne
entered the dairy and spoke to her; but it was not at all a
distressed blush, for it was inwreathed with smiles and dimples,
and with sparkles from under long curled dark eyelashes ; and
while her aunt was discoursing to him about the limited
amount of milk that was to be spared for butter and cheese
so long as the calves were not all weaned, and the large quan-
tity but inferior quality of milk yielded by the short-horn,
which had been bought on experiment, together with other
matters which must be interesting to a young gentleman who
would one day be a landlord, Hetty tossed and patted her
pound of butter with quite a self-possessed, coquettish air,
slyly conscious that no turn of her head was lost.

There are various orders of beauty, causing men to make
fools of themselves in various styles, from the desperate to
the sheepish ; but there is one order of beautv, which seems

A3AM BEBE. ^»

made to turn the heads, not only of men, but of all intelligent
mammals, even of women. It is a beauty like that of kittens,
or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with
their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle and to en-
gage in conscious mischief — a beauty with which you can
never be angry, but that you feel ready to crush for inabilitj'
to comprehend the state of mind into which it throws you.
Hetty Sorrel b was that sort of beauty. Her aunt, Mrs. Poy-
ser, who professed to despise all personal attractions, and in-
tended to be the severest of mentors, continually gazed at
Hetty's charms by the sly, fascinated in spite of herself ; and
after administering such a scolding as naturally flowed from
her anxiety to do well by her husband's niece — who had no
mother of her own to scold her, poor thing ! — she would often
confess to her husband, when they were safe out of hearings
that she firmly believed " the naughtier the little hussy be-
haved, the prettier she looked."

It is of little use for me to tell you that Hetty's cheek was
like a rose-petal, that dimples played about her pouting lips,
that her large, dark eyes hid a soft roguishness under their
long lashes, and that her curly hair, though all pushed back
under her round cap while she was at work, stole back in
dark, delicate rings on her forehead, and about her white,
shell-like ears ; it is of little use for me to say how lovely was
the contour of her pink and white neckerchief, tucked into
her low, plum-colored stuff bodice, or how the linen butter-
making apron, with its bib, seemed a thing to be imitated in
silk by duchesses, since it fell in such charming lines, or how
her brown stockings and thick-soled, buckled shoes lost all
that clumsiness which they must certainly have had when
empty of her foot and ankle — of little use, unless you have
seen a woman who affected you as Hetty affected her be-
holders, for otherwise, though you might conjure up the image
of a lovely woman, she would not in the least resemble that
distracting, kitten-like maiden. I might mention all the di-
vine charms of a bright spring day, but if you had never in
your life utterly forgotten yourself in straining your eyes after
the mountain lark, or in wandering through the still lanes
when the fresh-opened blossoms fill them with a sacred, silent
beauty like that of fretted aisles, where would be the use of
my descriptive catalogue ? I could never make you know
what I meant by a bright spring day. Hetty's was a spring-
tide beauty ; it was the beauty of young, frisking things, round-
IJnjbed, gamboling, circumventing you by a false air of inno-

78 ADAM BEDE.

cence — the innocence of a young star-browed call., for example,
that, being inclined ror a promenade out of bounds, leads you
a severe steeple-chase over hedge and ditch, and only comes
to a stand in the midale of a bog.

And they are the prettiest attitudes and movements into
which a pretty girl is thrown in making up butter — tossing
movements that give a charming curve to the arm, and a
sideward inclination of the round white neck ; little patting
and rolling movements with the palm of the hand, and nice
adaptations and finishings, which cannot at all be effected
without a great play of pouting mouth and the dark eyes. And
then the butter itself seems to communicate a fresh charm ;
it is so pure, so sweet-scented ; it is turned off the mould with
such a beautiful, firm surface, like marble in a pale yellow
light ! Moreover, Hetty was particularly clever at making up
the butter ; it was the one performance of hers that her aunt
allowed to pass without severe criticism ; so she handled it
with all the grace that belongs to mastery.

" I hope you will be ready for a great holiday on the thir-
tieth of July, Mrs. Poyser," said Captain Donnithorne, when
he had sufficiently admired the dairy, and given several im-
provised opinions on Swede turnips and short-horns. " You
know what is to happen then, and I shall expect you to be
one of the guests who come earliest and leave latest. Will
you promise me your hand for two dances, Miss Hetty ? If I
don't get your promise now, I know I shall hardly have a
chance, for all the smart young farmers will take care to se-
cure you."

Hetty smiled and blushed, but before she could answer,
Mrs. Poyser interposed, scandalized at the mere suggestion
that the young squire could be excluded by any meaner part-
ners.

" Indeed, sir, you're very kind to take that notice of her.
And I'm sure whenever you're pleased to dance with her she'll
be proud and thankful, if she stood still all the rest o' the
evening."

" Oh no, no, that would be too cruel to all the other young
fellows who can dance. But you will promise me two dances,
won't you ? " the captain continued, determined to make
Hetty look at him and speak to him.

Hetty dropped the prettiest little curtsey, and stole a
half-shy, half-coquettish glance at him as she said,

" Yes, thank you, sir."

"And you must bring all your children, you know, Mrs.

ADAM BEDE. y^

Poyser ; your little Totty, as well as the boys. I want all the
youngest children on the estate to be there — all those who
will be fine young men and women when I'm a bald old
fellow."

" Oh, dear sir, that 'uU be a long time first," said Mrs.
Poyser, quite overcome at the young squire's speaking so
lightly of himself, and thinking how her husband would be
interested in hearing her recount this remarkable specimen of
high-born humor. The captain was thought to be "ver^' full
of his jokes," and was a great favorite throughout the estate
on account of his free manners. Every tenant was quite sura
things would be different when the reins got into his hands —
there was to be a millennial abundance of new gates, allow-
ances of lime, and returns of ten per cent.

" But where is Totty to-day ? " he said. " I want to se*.
her."

"Where is the little un, Hetty ? " said Airs. Poyser. " She
came in here not long ago."

" I don't know. She went into the brewhouse to Nancy,
I think."

The proud mother, unable to resist the temptation to show
her Totty, passed at once into the back kitchen, in search of
her, not, however, without misgivings lest something should
have happened to render her person and attire unfit for pres-
entation.

" And do you carry the butter to market when you've
made it ?" said the captain to Hetty, meanwhile.

"Oh no, sir; not when it's so heavy; I'm not strong
enough to carry it. Alick takes it on horseback."

" No, I'm sure your pretty arms were never meant for
such heavy weights. But you go out a walk sometimes these
pleasant evenings, don't you ? Why don't you have a walk
in the Chase sometimes, now it's so green and pleasant? I
hardly ever see you anywhere except at home and at Church."

"Aunt doesn't like me to go a-walking only when I'm
going somewhere," said Hetty. " But I go through the Chase
sometimes."

" And don't you ever go to see Mrs. Best, the housekeeper ?
I think I saw you once in the housekeeper's room."

" It isn't Mrs. Best, it's Mrs. Pomfret, the lady's maid, as
I go to see. She's teaching me tent-stitch and the lace-mend-
ing. I'm going to tea with her to-morrow afternoon."

The reason why there had been space for this tHe-a-Ute
can only be known by looking into the back kitchen, where

8o ADAM BEDE.

Totty nad been discovered rubbing a stray blue-bag against
her nose, and in the same moment allowing some liberal in-
digo drops to fall on her afternoon pinafore. But now she
appeared holding her mother's hand — the end of her round
nose rather shiny from a recent and hurried application of
soap and water.

" Here she is ! " said the captain, lifting her up and set-
ting her on the low stone shelf. " Here's Totty ! By the by,
what's her other name .'' She wasn't christened Totty."

" Oh, sir, we call her sadly out of her name. Charlotte's
her christened name. It's a name i' Mr. Poyser's family ; his
grandmother was named Charlotte. But we began with call-
ing her Lotty, and now it's got to Totty. To be sure it's more
like a name for a dog than a Christian child."

"Totty's a capital name. Why, she looks like a Totty.
Has she got a pocket on ? " said the captain, feeling in his
own waistcoat pockets,

Totty immediately with great gravity lifted up her frock,
and showed a tiny pink pocket at present in a state of collapse.

" It dot notin in it," she said, as she looked down at it
very earnestly.

" No ! what a pity ! such a pretty pocket. Well, I think
I've got some things in mine that will make a pretty jingle in
it. Yes ! I declare I've got five little round silver things, and
hear what a pretty noise they make in Totty's pink pocket."
Here he shook the pocket with the five sixpences in it, and
Totty showed her teeth and wrinkled her nose in great glee ;
but divining that there was nothing more to begot by staying,
she jumped off the shelf and ran away to jingle her pocket in
the hearing of Nancy, while her mother called after her, " Oh,
for shame, you naughty gell ! not to thank the captain for
what he's given you. I'm sure, sir, it's very kind of you ; but
she's spoiled shameful ; her father won't have her said nay
in any thing, and there's no managing her. It's being the
youngest, and th' only gell."

" Oh, she's a funny little fatty ; I wouldn't have her differ-
ent. But I must be going now, for I suppose the rector is
waiting for me."

With a "good-by," a bright glance, and a bow to Hetty,
Arthur left the dairy. But he was mistaken in imaging him-
self waited for. The rector had been so much interested in
his conversation with Dinah, that he would not have chosen
to close it earlier ; and you shall hear now what they had been
saying to each other.

JkDAM HJitym %\

CHAPTER YIII.

A VOCATION.

Dinah, who had risen when the gentlemen came in, but
still kept hold of the sheet she was mending, curtseyed re-
spectfully when she saw Mr. Irwine looking at her and ad-
vancing toward her. He had never yet spoken to her, or
stood face to face with her, and her first thought, as her eyes
met his, was, " What a well-favored countenance! Oh that
the good seed might fall on that soil, for it would surely flour-
ish," The agreeable impression must have been mutual, for
Mr. Irwine bowed to her with a benignant deference, which
would have been equally in place if she had been the most
dignified lady of his acquaintance.

" You are only a visitor in this neighborhood, I think ? "
were his first words, as he seated himself opposite to her.

" No, sir, I come from Snowfield, in Stonyshire. But my
aunt was very kind, wanting me to have rest from my work
there, because I'd been ill, and she invited me to come and
stay with her for a while.'

" Ah ! I remember Snowlield very well ; I once had occa-
sion to go there. It's a dreary, bleak place. Thev were
building a cotton-mill there ; but that's many years ago now ;,
I suppose the place is a good deal changed by the employment
that mill must have brought."

" It is changed so far as the mill has brought people there,,
who get a livelihood for themselves by working in it, and make
it better for the tradesfolks. I work in it myself, and have
reason to be grateful, for thereby I have enough and to spare.
But it's still a bleak place, as you say, sir — very different from
this country."

"You have relations living there probably, so that you are
attached to the place as your home ? "

" I nad an aunt there once ; she brought me up, for I was
an orphan. But she was taken away seven years ago, and I
6

«2 ADAM BEDE.

have no other kindred that 1 know of, besides my auni Poyser,
who is very good to me, and would have me come and live in
this country, which to be sure is a good land, wherein they
eat bread without scarceness. But I'm not free to leave
Snowfield, where I was first planted, and have grown deep
into it, like the small grass on the hill-top."

" Ah ! I dare say you have many religious friends and
companions there; you are a Methodist — a Wesleyan, I
think?"

" Yes, my aunt at Snowfield belonged to the Society, and
I have cause to be thankful for the privileges I have had
thereby from my earliest childhood."

" And have you been long in the habit of preaching ? — for
I understand you preached at Hayslope last night."

" I first took to the work four years since, when I was
twenty-one."

" Your Society sanctions women's preaching, then } "

"It doesn't forbid them, sir, when they've a clear call
the work, and when their ministry is owned by the conversion
of sinners and the strengthening of God's people. Mrs.
Fletcher, as you may have heard about, was the first woman
to preach in the Society, I believe, before she was married,
when she was Miss Bosanquet ; and Mr. Wesley approved of
her undertaking the work. She had a great gift, and there
are many others now living who are precious fellow-helpers in
the work of the ministry. I understand there's been voices
raised against it in the Society of late, but I cannot but think
their counsel will come to naught. It isn't for men to make
channels for God's Spirit, as they make channels for the water-
courses, and say, ' Flow here, but flow not there.' "

" But don't you find some danger among your people — I
don't mean to say that it is so with you, far from it — but don't
you find sometimes that both men and women fancy them-
selves channels for God's Spirit and are quite mistaken, so
that they set about a work for which they are unfit, and bring
holy things into contempt ? "

'' Doubtless it is so sometimes, for there have been evil-
doers among us who have sought to deceive the brethren, and
some there are who deceive their own selves. But we are not
without discipline and correction to put a check upon these
things. "There's a very strict order kept among us, and the
brethren and sisters watch for each other's souls as they that
must give account. They don't go every one his own way
and say, ' Am I my brother's keeper ? ' "

ADAM BEDE. 83

" But tell me — if I may ask, and I am really interested in
knowing it — how you first came to think of preaching ? "

" Indeed, sir, I didn't think of it at all — I'd been used
from the time I was sixteen to talk to the little children and
teach them, and sometimes I had had my heart enlarged to
speak in class, and was much drawn out in prayer with the
sick. Rut I had felt no call to preach ; for, when I'm not
greatly wrought upon, I'm too much given to sit still and keep
by myself ; it seems as if I could sit silent all day long with
the thought of God overflowing my soul — as the pebbles lie
bathed in the Willow Brook. For thoughts are so great —
aren't they, sir ? They seem to lie upon us like a deep flood ;
and it's my besetment to forget where I am and every thing
about me, and lose myself in thoughts that I could give no
account of, for I could neither make a beginning nor ending
of them in words. That was my way as long as I can re-
member : but sometimes it seemed as if speech came to me
without any will of my own, and words were given to me that
came out as the tears come, because our hearts are full and
we can't help it. And those were alwavs times of great bless-
ing, though I had never thought it could be so with me before
a congregation of people. But, sir, we are led on, like the
little children, by a way that we know not. I was called to
preach quite suddenly, and since then I have never been left
in doubt about the work that was laid upon me."

" But tell me the circumstances — just how it was, the very
day you began to preach."

" It was one Sunday I walked with Brother Marlowe, who
was an aged man, one of the local preachers, all the way to
Hetton-Deeps — that's a village where the people get their liv-
ing by working in the lead mines, and where there's no church
nor preacher, but they live like sheep without a shepherd.
It's better than twelve miles from Snowfield, so we set out
early in the morning, for it was summer time ; and I had a
wonderful sense of the Divine love as we walked over the hills,
where there's no trees, you know, sir, as there is here, to make
the sky look smaller, but you see the heavens stretched out
like a tent, and you feel the everlasting arms around you. But,
before we got to Hetton, Brother Mar' owe was seized with a
dizziness that made him afraid of falling, for he overworked
himself sadly at his years, in watching and praying, and walk-
ing so many miles to speak the Word, as well as carrying on
his trade of linen-weaving. And when we got to the village
the people were expecting hira, for he'd appointed the time

84 ADAM BEDS.

and the place when he was there before, and such of them as
cared to hear the Word of Life were assembled on a spot
where the cottages was thickest, so as others might be drawn
to come. But he felt as he couldn't stand up to preach, and
he was forced to lie down in the first of the cottages we came
to. So I went to tell the people, thinking we'd go into one
of the houses, and I would read and pray with them. But as
I passed along by the cottages and saw the aged trembling
women at the doors, and the hard looks of the men, who
seemed to have their eyes no more filled with the sight of the
Sabbath morning than if they had been dumb oxen that never
looked up to the sky, I felt a great movement in my soul, and
I trembled as if I was shaken by a strong spirit entering into
my weak body. And I went to where the little flock of people
was gathered together, and stepped on the low wall that was
buili; against the green hill-side, and I spoke the words that
were given to me abundantly. And they all came round me
out of all the cottages, and many wept over their sins and have
since been joined to the Lord. This was the beginning of my
preaching, sir, and I've preached ever since."

Dinah had let her work fall during this narrative, which
she uttered in her usual simple way, but with that sincere,
articulate, thrilling treble, by which she always mastered her
audience. She stooped now to gather up her sewing, and
then went on with it as before. Mr. Irwine was deeply inter-
ested. He said to himself, " He must be a miserable prig
who would act the pedagogue here ; one might as well go and
lecture the trees for growing in their own shape."

" And you never feel any embarrassment from the sense
of your youth — that you are a lovely young woman on whom
men's eyes are fixed .'' " he said aloud.

" No, I've no room for such feelings, and I don't believe
. the people ever take notice about that. I think, sir, when
God makes his presence felt through us, we are like the burn-
ing bush : Moses never took any heed what sort of bush it
was — he only saw the brightness of the Lord. I've preached
to as rough ignorant people as can be in the villages about
Snowfield — men that look very hard and wild ; but they never
said an uncivil word to me, and often thanked me kindly as
they made way for me to pass through the midst of them."

" That I can believe — that I can well believe," 'said Mr.
Irwine, emphatically. " And what did you think of your
hearers last night, now ? Did you find them quiet and atten-
tive ? "

ADAM BEDE. gj

*' Very quiet, sir ; but I saw no signs of any greater work
upon them, except in a young girl named Bessy Cranage, to
ward whom my heart yearned greatly, when my eyes first feb
on her blooming youth given up to folly and vanity. 1 had
some private talk and prayer with her afterward, and I trust
her heart is touched. But I've noticed, that in these villages
where the people lead a quiet life among the green pas-
tures and the still waters, tilling the ground and tending
the cattle, there's a strange deadness to the Word, as different
as can be from the great towns, like Leeds, where I once went
to visit a holy woman who preaches there. It's wonderful
how rich is the harvest of souls up those high-walled streets,
where you seem to walk as in a prison yard, and the ear is
deafened with the sounds of worldly toil. I think maybe it is
because the promise is sweeter when this life is so dark and
weary, and the soul gets more hungry when the body is ill at
ease."

•' Wh}', yes, our farm-laborers are not easily roused. They
take life almost as slowly as the sheep and cows. But we
have some intelligent workmen about here. I dare say you
know the Bedes ; Seth Bede, by the by, is a Methodist."

''Yes, I know Seth well, and his brother Adam a little.
Seth is a gracious young man — sincere and without offence ;
and Aaam is like the patriarch Joseph, for his great skill and
knowledge, and the kindness he shows to his brother and his
parents."

'• Perhaps you don't know the trouble that has just hap-
pened to them ? Their father, Matthias Bede, was drowned
ill the Widow Brook last night, not far from his own door.
l"m going now to see Adam."

"Ah! their poor aged mother!" said Dinah, dropping
her hands and looking before her with pitying eyes, as if she
saw the object ot her sympath3^ " She will mourn heavily ;
for Seth has told me she's of an anxious, troubled heart. I
must go and see if 1 can give her any help."

As she rose and was beginning to fold up her work, Cap-
tain Donnithorne, having exhausted all plausible pretexts for
remaining among the milk-pans, came out of the dairy, fol-
lowed by Mrs. Foyser. Mr. Irwine now rose also, and, ad-
vancing toward Dinah, held out his hand, and said,

" Good-by. I hear you are going away soon ; but this will
not be the last visit you will pay your aunt — so we shall meet
again, I hope."

His cordiality toward Dinah set all Mrs. Poyser's anxic'

86 ADAM BEDS.

ties at rest, an^ ner face was brighter than usual, as she said,

" I've never asked aker Mrs. Irwine and the Miss Irwines,
sir; I hope they are as well as usual."

" Yes, thank you, Mrs. Peyser, except that Miss Anne has
one of her bacl headaches to-day. By the by, we all liked that
nice cream cheese you sent us — my mother especially."

" I'm very glad, indeed, sir. It is but seldom I make one,
but I remembered Mrs. Irwine was fond of 'em. Please to
give my duty to her, and to Miss Kate and Miss Anne.
They've never been to look at my poultry this long while,
and I've got some beautiful speckled chickens black and white,
as Miss Kate might like to liave some of among hers."

" Well, I'll tell her ; she must come and see them. Good-
by," said the rector, mounting his horse.

"Just ride slowly on, Irwine," said Captain Donnithorne,
mounting also. "I'll overtake you in three minutes. I'm
only going to speak to the shepherd about the whelps. Good-
by, Mrs. Poyser ; tell your husband I shall come and have a
long talk with him soon."

Mrs. Poyser curtseyed duly, and watched the two horses
until they had disappeared from the yard, amid great excite-
ment on the part of the pigs and the poultry, and under the
furious indignation of the bull-dog, who performed a Pyrrhic
dance, that every moment seemed to threaten the breaking of
his chain. Mrs. Poyser delighted in this noisy exit ; it was a
fresh assurance to her that the farm-yard was well guarded,
and that no loiterers could enter unobserved ; and it was not
until the gate had closed behind the captain that she turned
into the kitchen again, where Dinah stood with her bonnet in
her hand, waiting to speak to her aunt before she set out for
Lisbeth Bede's cottage.

Mrs. Poyser, however, though she noticed the bonnet,
deferred remarking on it until she had disburdened herself of
her surprise at Mr. Irwine's behavior.

"Why, Mr. Irwine wasn't angry, then ? What did he say
to you, Dinah ? Didn't he scold .you for preaching ? "

" No, he was not at all angry. He was very friendly to
me. I was quite drawn out to speak to him ; I hardly know
how, for I had always thought of him as a worldly Sadducee.
But his countenance is as pleasant as the morning sunshine."

" Pleasant ! and what else did y' expect to find him but
pleasant ? " said Mrs. Poyser, impatiently, resuming her knit-
ting. " I should think his countenance is pleasant indeed I
and him a gentleman born, and's got a mother like a picter,

ADAM BEDE. 87

Vou may go the country round and not find such another
woman turned sixty-six. It's summat-like to see such a man
as that i' the desk of a Sunday ! As I say to Poyser, it's Uke
booking at a full crop o' wheat, or a pasture with a fine
dairy o' cows in it \ it makes you think the world's comfortable-
like. But as for such creatures as you Methodisses run after,
I'd as soon go to look at a lot o' bare-ribbed runts on a common.
Fine folks they are to tell you what's right, as look as if they'd
never tasted nothing better than bacon-sword and sour-cake i'
their lives. But what did Mr. irwine say to you about that
fool's trick o' preaching on the Green ? "

" He only said he'd heard of it ; he didn't seem to feel
any displeasure about it. But, dear aunt, don't think any
more about that. He told me something that i'm sure will
cause you sorrow, as it does me. Thias Bede was drowned
last night in the Willow Brook, and i'm thinking that the
aged mother will be greatly in need of comfort. Perhaps I
can be of use to her, so 1 have fetched my bonnet and am
going to set out."

" Dear heart ! dear heart ! But yeu must have a cup o'
tea first, child," said Mrs. Poyser, falling at once from the
key of B with five sharps to the frank and genial C. " The
kettle's boiling — we'll have it ready in a minute ; and the
young uns'll be in and wanting theirs directly. I'm quite
wilUng you should go and see th' old woman, for you're one
as is allays vi^elcome in trouble, Methodist or no Methodist ;
but for the matter o' that, it's the flesh and blood folks are
made on as makes the difference. Some cheeses are made o'
skimmed milk and some o' new milk, and it's no matter what
you call 'em, you may tell which is which by the look and the
smell. But as to Thias Bede, he's better out o' the way nor
in — God forgi' me for saying so — for he's done little this ten
year but make trouble for them as belonged to him ; and I
think it 'ud be well for you to take a little bottle o' rum for
th' old woman, for I dare say she's got never a drop o' nothing
to comfort her inside. Sit down, child, and be easy, for you
sha'n't stir out till you've had a cup o' tea, and so I tell you."

During the latter part of this speech, Mrs. Poyser had
been reaching down the tea-things from the shelves, and was
on her way toward the pantry for the loaf, followed close by
Totty, who had made her appearance on the rattling of the
tea-cups, when Hetty came out of the dairy relieving her
tired arms by lifting them up, and ckisping her hands at the
back of her head.

88 ADAM BEDE.

" Molly," she said, rather languidly, "just run out and
get me a bunch of dock-leaves ; the butter's ready to pack up
now."

" D' you hear what's happened, Hetty ? " said her aunt.

"No; how should I hear anything?" was the answer
in a pettish tone.

" Not as you'd care much, I dare say, if you did hear ; foi
you're too feather-headed to mind if every body was dead so
as you could stay up stairs a-dressing yourself for two hours
by the clock, But any body besides yourself 'ud mind about
such things happenmg to them as think a deal more of you
than you deserve. But Adam Bede, and all his kin might be
drownded for what you'd care— you d be perking at the glass
the next minute."

" Adam Bede— drowned ? " said Hetty, letting her arms
fall, and looking rather bewildered, but suspecting that hei
aunt was, as usual, exaggerating with a didactic purpose.

" No, my dear, no," said Dinah, kindly, for Mrs. Poyser
had passed on to the pantry without deigning more precise
information. "Not Adam. Adam's father, the old man, is
drowned. He was drowned last night in the Willow Biook,
Mr. Irwine has just told me about it."

" Oh, how dreadful ! " said Hetty, looking serious, but
not deeply affected ; and as Molly now entered with the dock-
leaves, she took them silently and returned to the dairy with-
out askmg farther questions.

CHAPTER IX.

Hetty's world.

While she adjusted the broad leaves that set off the pale
fragrant butter as the primrose is set off by its nest of green. I
am afraid Hetty was thinking a great deal more of the looks
Captain Donninthorne had cast at her than of Adam and his
troubles. Bright, admiring glances from a handsome young
gentleman, with white hands, a gold chain, occasional regi-
mentals, and wealth and grandeur immeasurable — those
were the warm rays that set poor Hetty's heart vibrating, and
playing its little foolish tunes over and over again. We do not

ADAM BEDS. 89

hear that Memnon s statue gave forth its melody at all under
the rushing of the mightiest wind, or in response to any other
influence, divine or human, than certain short-lived sunbeams
of mornin- ; and we must learn to accommodate ourselves to
the discov'^ry that some of those cunningly-fashioned instru-
ments called human souls have only a very limited range o£
music, and will not vibrate in the least under a touch than fills
others with tremulous rapture or quivering agony.

Hetty was quite used to the thought that people liked to
look at her. She was not blind to the fact that young Luke
Britton of Broxton came to Hayslope church on a Sunday
afternoon on purpose that he might see her ; r.nd that he would
have made much more decided advances .t her uncle Poyser,
thinking but lightly of a young man whose father s land was
so foul as old Luke Britton's, had not forbidden her aunt to
encourage him by any civilities. She was aware, too, that Mr.
Craio-, the gardener at the Chase, was over head and ears m
love with her, and had lately made unmistakable avowals in
luscious strawberries and hyperbolical peas. She knew still
better that Adam Bede— tall, upright clever, brave Adam Bede
—who carried such authority with all the people round about,
and whom her uncle was always delighted to see^of an eve-
nino-, saying that " Adam knew a fine sight more o' the natur'
o' th'ings than those as thought themselves his betters " — she
knew that this Adam, who was often rather stern to other peo-
ple, and not much given to run after the lasses, could be made
to turn pale or red any day by a word or a look from her.
Hetty's sphere of comparison was not large, but she couldn't
help perceiving that Adam was " something like " a man ; al-
ways knew what to say about things ; could tell her unclehow
to prop the hovel, and had mended the churn in no time ;
knew, with only looking at it, the value of the chestnut-tree
that was blown down, and why the damp came in the walls, and
what they must do to stop the rats ; and wrote a beautiful hand
that you could read off, and could do figures in his head— a
degree of accomplishment totally unknown among the richest
farmers of that countrv-side. Not at all like that slouching
Luke Britton, who, when she once walked with him all the way
from Broxton to Hayslope, had only broken silence to remark
that the gray goose had begun to lay. And as for Mr. Craig,
the gardener, "he was a sensible man enough, to be sure, but
he was knock-kneed, and had a queer sort of sing-song in his
talk ; moreover, on the most charitable supposition, he must
be far on the way to forty.

go ADAM BEDS.

Hetty was quite certain her uncle wanted her to encourage
Adam, and would be pleased for her to marry him. For those
were times when there was no rigid demarkation of rank be-
tween the farmer and the respectable artisan ; and on the home-
hearth, as well as in the public house, they might be seen tak-
ing their jug of ale together, the farmer having a latent sense
of capital, and of weight in parish affairs, which sustained him
under his conspicuous inferiority in conversation. Martin Poy-
ser was not a frequenter of public houses, but he liked a friend-
ly chat over his own home-brewed ; and though it was pleas-
ant to lay down the law to a stupid neighbor who had no
notion how to make the best of his farm, it was also an agree-
able variety to learn something from a clever fellow like Adam
Bede. Accordingly, for the last three years — ever since he
had superintended the building of the new barn — Adam had
always been made welcome at the Hall Farm, especially of a
winter evening, when the whole family, in patriarchal fashion,
master and mistress, children and servants, were assembled in
that glorious kitchen, at well graduated distances from the
blazing fire. And for the last two years at least Hetty had
been in the habit of hearing her uncle say, " Adam Bede may
be working for wage now, but he'll be a master-man some day,
as sure as I sit in this chair. Mester Burge is in the right on't
to want him to go partners and marry his daugther, if it's true
what they say ; the woman as marries him 'ull have a good take,
be't Lady-day or Michaelmas " — a remark which Mrs. Poyser
always followed up with her cordial assent. " Ah ! " she would
say, " it's all very fine having a ready-made rich man, but may
happen he'll be a ready-made fool ; and it's no use filling your
pocket o' money if you've got a hole in the corner. It'll do
you no good to sit in a spring-cart o' your own if you've got
a soft to drive you ; he'll soon turn you over into the ditch. I
allays said I'd never marry a man as had got brains ; for where's
the use of a woman having brains of her own if she's tackled
to a geek as everybody's a-laughing at ? She might as well
dress herself fine to sit back'ard on a donkey."

These expressions, though figurative, sufficiently indicated
the bent of Mrs. Peyser's mind with regard to Adam : and
though she and her husband might have viewed the subject
differently if Hetty had been a daughter of their own, it was
clear that they would have welcomed the match with Adam
for a penniless niece. For what could Hetty have been but a
servant elsewhere, if her uncle had not taken her in and
brought her up as a domestic help to her aunt, whose health

ADAM BEDE.

since the birth of Totty had not been equal to more positive
labor than the superintendence of servants and children ?
But Hetty had never given Adam any steady encouragement.
Even in the moments when she was most thoroughly conscious
of his superiority to her other admirers, she had never brought
herself to think of accepting him. She liked to feel that this
strong, skilful, keen-eyed man was in her power, and would
have been indignant if he had shown the least sign of slipping
from under the yoke of her coquettish tyranny, and attaching
himself to the gentle Mary Burge, who would have been grate-
ful enough for the most trifling notice from him, " Mary
Burge, indeed ! such a sallow-faced girl ; if she put on a bit of
pink ribbon, she looked as yellow as a crow-flower, and her
hair was as straight as a hank of cotton." And always when
Adam staid away for several weeks from the Hall Farm, and
otherwise make same show of resistance to his passion as a
foolish one, Hetty took care to entice him back into the net
by little airs of meekness and timidity, as if she were in trouble
at his neglect. But as to marrying Adam, that was a very dif-
ferent affair ! There was nothing in the world to tempt her
to do that. Her cheeks never grew a shade deeper when his
name was mentioned ; she felt no thrill when she saw him
passing along the causeway by the window, or advancing to-
ward her unexpectedly in the footpath across the meadow ; she
felt nothing when his eyes rested on her but the cold triumph
of knowing that he loved her and would not care to look at
Mary Burge. He could no more stir in her the emotions that
make the sweet intoxication of young love, than the mere pic-
ture of a sun can stir the spring sap in the subtle fibres of the
plant. She saw him as he was, a poor man, with old parents
to keep, who would not be able, for a long while to come, to
give her even such luxuries as she shared in her uncle's house.
And Hetty's dreams were all luxuries : to sit in a carpeted
parlor, and always wear white stockings ; to have some large,
beautiful earrings, such as were all the fashion ; to have
Nottingham lace round the top of her gown, and something
to made her handkerchief smell nice, like Miss Lydia Donni-
thorne's when she drew it out at church ; and not to be obliged
to get up early or be scolded by anybody. She thought, if
Adam had been rich and could have given her these things,
she loved him well enough to marry him.

But for the last few weeks a new influence had come over
Hetty, vague, atmospheric, shaping itself into no self-confessed
hopes or prospects, but producing a pleasant narcotic effect,

9 2 A DA A/ BEDE.

making her tread the ground and go about her work in a sort
of dream, unconscious of weight or effort, and showing her all
tilings through a soft, liquid veil, as if she were living not in
this solid world of brick and stone, but in a beatified world,
such as the sun lights up for us in the waters. Hetty had be-
come aware that Mr. Arthur Donnithorne would take a good
deal of trouble for the chance of seeing her ; that he always
placed himself at church so as to have the fullest view of her
both sitting and standing ; that he was constantly finding rea-
sons for calling at the Hall Farm, and always would contrive
to say something for the sake of making her speak to him
and look at him. The poor child no more conceived at present
the idea that the young squire could ever be her lover, than a
baker's pretty daughter in the crowd, whom a young emperor
distinguishes by an imperial but admiring smile, conceives
that she shall made empress. But the baker's daughter goes
home and dreams of the handsome young emperor, and per
haps weighs the flour amiss while she is thinking what a heav-
enly lot it must be to have him for a husband : and so poor
Hetty had got a face and a presence haunting her waking and
sleeping dreams ; bright, soft glances had penetrated her, and
suffused her life with a strange, happy languor. The eyes
that shed those glances were really not half so fine as Adam's
which sometimes look at her with a sad, beseeching tender-
ness : but they had found a ready medium in Hetty's little silly
imagination, whereas Adam's could get no entrance through
that atmosphere-. For three weeks, at least, her inward life
had consisted of little else than living through in memory the
looks and words Arthur had directed toward her — of little
else than recalling the sensations with which she heard his
voice outside the door, and saw him enter, and became con-
scious that his eyes were fixed on her, and then became con-
scious than a tall figure, looking down on her with eyes that
seemed to touch her, was coming nearer in clothes of beauti-
ful texture, with an order like that of a flower-garden borne on
the evening breeze. Foolish thoughts, you see ; having nothing
at all to do with the love felt by sweet girls of eighteen in our
days ; but all this happened, you must remember, nearly sixty
years ago, and Hetty was quite uneducated — a simple farmer's
girl, to whom a gentlemen with a white hand was dazzling as an
Olympian god. Until to-day she had never looked farther into
the future than to the next time Captain Donnithorne would
come to the Farm.or'the next Sunday when she should see him
at church -, but now she thought perhaps he would try to meet

ADAM BEDE.

her when she went to the Chase to-morrow — and if he should
speak to her, and walk a little way, when nobody was by !
That had never happened yet ; and now her imagination, in-
stead of retracing the past, was busy fashioning what would
happen to-morrow — whereabout in the Chase she should see
him coming toward her, how she should put her new rose-col-
ored ribbon on which he had never seen, and what he would
say to her to make her return his glances — a glance which she
would be living through in her memory, over and over again,
all the rest of the day.

In this state of mind how could Hetty give any feeling to
Adam's troubles, or think much about poor old Thias being
drowned ? Young souls, in sucii pleasant delirium as hers, are
as unsympathetic as butterflies sipping nectar ; they are iso-
lated from all appeals by a barrier of dreams — by invisible
looks and impalpable arms.

While Hetty's hands were busy packing up the butter, and
her head filled with these pictures of the morrow, Arthur Uon-
nithorne, riding by Mr. Irwine's side toward the valley of the
Willow Brook, had also certain indistinct anticipations, run-
ning as an under-current in his mind while he was listening to
Mr. Irwine's account of Dinah ; indistinct, yet strong enough
to make him feel rather conscious when Mr. Irvvine suddenly
said,

" What fascinated you so in Mrs. Poyser's dairy, Arthur ?
Have you become an amateur of damp quarries and skimming-
dishes ? "

Arthur knew the rector too well to suppose that a clever
invention would be of any use, so he said, with his accustomed
frankness,

" No, I went to look at the pretty butter-maker, Hetty Sor-
rel. She's a perfect Hebe ; and if I were an artist I would
paint her. It's amazing what pretty girls one sees among the
farmers' daughters, when the men are such clowns. That
common round red face one sees sometimes in the men — all
cheek and no features, like Martin Poyser's — comes out in the
women of ihe family as the most charming phiz imaginable."

" Well, I have no objection to your contemplating Hetty
in an artistic light, but I must not have you feeding her van-
ity, and filling her little noddle with the notion that she's a
great beauty, attractive to fine gentlemen, or you will spoil her
for a poor man's wife — honest Craig's, for example, whom I
have seen bestowing soft glances on her. The little puss
$eems already to have airs enough to make a husband as

ADAM BEDE.

miserable as it's a law of nature fo? a quiet man to be when he
marries a beauty. Apropos of marrying, I hope our friend
Adam will get settled, now the poor old man's gone. He will
only have his mother to keep in future, and I've a notion that
there's a kindness between him and that nice modest girl,
Mary Burge, from something that fell from old Jonathan one
day when I was talking to him. But when I mentioned the
subject to Adam he looked uneasy, and turned the conver-
sation. I suppose the love-making doesn't run smooth, or per-
haps Adam hangs back till he's in a better position. He has
independence of spirit enough for two men — rather an excess
of pride, if anything."

" That would be a capital match for Adam. He would slip
into old Burge's shoes, and make a fine thing of that building
business, I'll answer for him. I should like to see him well
settled in this parish ; he would be ready, then, to act as my
grand-vizier when I wanted one. We could plan no end of
repairs and improvements together. I've never seen the girl,
though, I think — at least I've never looked at her."

" Look at her next Sunday at church — she sits with her fa-
ther on the left of the reading-desk. You needn't look quite
so much at Hetty Sorrel then. When I've made up my mind
that I can't afford to buy a tempting dog, I take no notice of
him, because if he took a strong fancy to me and looked lov-
ingly at me, the struggle between aritlimetic and inclination
might become unpleasantly severe. I pique myself on my
wisdom there, Arthur, and, as an old fellow to whom wisdom
has become cheap, I can bestow it upon you."

" Thank you. It may stand me in a good stead some day,
though I don't know that I have any present use for it. Bless
me ! how the brook has overflowed. Suppose we have a can-
ter now we're at at the bottom of the hill."

That is the great advantage of dialogue on horseback ; it
can be merged any minute into a trot or a canter, and one
might have escaped from Socrates himself in the saddle. The
two friends were free from the necessity of farther conversation
till they pulled up in the lane behind Adam's cottage.

ADAM BED^. 55

CHAPTER X

DINAH VISITS LISBETH.

At five o'clock Lisbeth came clown stairs with a large key
in her hand \ it was the key of the chamber where her husband
lay dead. Throughout the day, except in her occasional out-
burst of wailing grief, she had been in incessant movement,
performing the initial duties to her dead with the awe and ex-
actitude that belongs to religious rites. She had brought out
her little store of bleached linen, which she had for long years
kept in reserve for this supreme use. It seemed but yester-
day— that time so many midsummers ago, when she had told
Thias where this linen lay, that he might be sure and reach it
out for her w^hen she died, for she was the elder of the two.
Then there had been the work of cleansing to the strictest
purity every object in the sacred chamber, and of removing
from it every trace of common daily occupation. The small
window which had hitherto freely let in the frosty moonlight
or the warm summer sunrise on the working man's slumber,
must now be darkened with a fair white sheet, for this was the
sleep which is as sacred under the bare rafters as in ceiled
houses. Lisbeth had even mended a long-neglected and unno-
ticeable rent in the checkered bit of bed curtain \ for the mo-
ments were few and precious now in which she would be able
to do the smallest office of respect or love for the still corpse,
to which in all her thoughts she attributed some conscious-
ness. Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten
them ; they can be injured by us, they can be wounded ; they
know all our penitence, all our aching sense that their place
is empty ■ all the kisses we bestow on the smallest relic of
their presence. And the aged peasant woman most of all be-
lieves that her dead are conscious. Decent burial was what
Lisbeth had been thinking of for herself through years of
thrift, with an indistinct expectation that she should know
when she was being carried to the church-yard, followed by
her husband and her sons ; and now she felt as if the greatest
work of her life were to be done in seeing that Thias was
decently buried before her — under the white thorn, where
once in a dream she had thought she lay in the coffin, yet all
the while saw the sunshine above, and smelt the white

^6 ADAM BEDE.

blossoms that were so thick upon the thorn the Sunday she
went to be churched after Adam was born.

But now she had done everything that could be done to-
day in the chamber of death — had done it all herself, with
some aid from her sons in lifting, for she would let no one be
fetched to help her from the village, not being fond of female
neighbors generally ; and her favorite Dolly, the old house-
keeper at Mr. Barge's, who had come to condole with her in
the morning as soon as she heard of Thias's death was toe
dim-sighted to be of much use. She had locked the door, and
now held the key in her hand, as she drew herself wearily into
a chair that stood out of its place in the middle of the house
floor, where in ordinary times she would never have consented
to sit. The kitchen had had none of her attention that day ;
it was soiled with the tread of muddy shoes, and untidy with
clothes and other objects out of place. But what at another
time would have been intolerable to Lisbeth's habits of order
and cleanliness, seemed to her now just what should be ; it
was right that things should look strange, and disordered,
and wretched, now the old man had come to his end in that
sad way ; the kitchen ought not to look as if nothing had
happened. Adam, overcome with the agitations and exertions
of the day, after his night of hard work, had fallen asleep on
a bench in the workshop ; and Seth was in the back kitchen,
making a fire of sticks, that he might get the kettle to boil,
and persuade his mother to have a cup of tea, an indulgence
which she rarely allowed herself.

There was no one in the kitchen when Lisbeth entered and
threw herself into the chair. She looked round with blank
eyes at the dirt and confusion on which the bright afternoon
sun shone dismally \ it was all of a piece with the sad confusion
of her mind — that confusion which belongs to the first hours
of a sudden sorrow, when the poor human soul is like one
who has been deposited sleeping among the ruins of a vast
city, and wakes up in dreary amazement, not knowing whether
it is the growing or the dying day — not knowing why and
whence came this illimitable scene of desolation, or why he too
finds himself desolate in the midst of it.

At another time, Lisbeth's first thought would have been,
" Where is Adam ? " but the sudden death of her husband had
restored him in these hours to that first place in her aflfec-
tions which he had held six-and-twenty years before ; she had
forgotten his faults as we forget the sorrows of our departed
childhood, and thought of no.thing but the young husband's

ADAM BEDE. ^

kindness and the old man's patience. Her eyes continued to
wander blankly until Seth came in and began' to remove some
of the scattered things, and clear the small round deal table,
that he might set out his mother's tea upon it.

"What art goin' to do?" she said, rather peevishly,
" I want thee to have a cup of tea, mother," answered
Seth, tenderly. " It'll do thee good ; and I'll put two or
three of these things away, and make the house look more
comfortable."

"Comfortable ! How canst talk o' ma'in' things comfort-
able ? • Let a-be, let a-be. There's no comfort "for me no
more," she went on, the tears coming when she began to
speak, "now thy poor feyther's gone, as I'n washed for and
mended, an' got's victual for'm for thirty 'ear, an' him allays
so pleased wi' iverything I done for'm, an' used to be so
handy an' do the jobs for me when I war ill an' cumbered wi'
th' babby, an' made me the posset an' brought it up stairs as
pioud as could be, an' carried the lad as war as heavy as two
children for iive mile, an' ne'er grumbled, all che way to
War'son Wake, 'cause I wanted to go an' see my sister, as
war dead an' gone the very n.ext Christmas as e'er come.
An' him to he drownded in the brook as we passed o'er the
day we war married an' come home together, an' he'd made
them lots o' shelves for me to put my plates an' things on, an'
showed 'em me as proud as he could be, 'cause he know'd I
should be pleased. An' he war to die an' me not to know,
but to be a-sleepin' i' my bed, as if I caredna noght about it.
Eh ! an' me to live to see that ! An' us as war young folks
once, an' thought we should do rarely when we war married !
Let a-be, lad, let a-be ! I wonna' ha' no tay ; I carena if I
ne'er ate nor drink no more. When one end o' th' brido-e
tumbles down, where's th' use o' th' other stannin' ? I may's
well die, an' foller my old man. There's no knowin'but he'll
want me."

Here Lisbeth broke from words into moans, swaying her-
self backward and forward on her chair. Seth, always timid
in his behavior toward his mother, from the sense that he had
no influence over her, felt it was useless to attempt to persuade
or soothe her till this passion was past ; so he contented him-
self with tending the back-kitchen fire, and folding up his
father's clothes, which had b*?en hanging out to dry since
morning ; afraid to move about the room where his mother
was, lest he should irritate her farther.

But after Lisbeth had been rocking herself and moaning

gg ADAM BEDE.

lor some minutes, she suddenly paused, and said aloud to
herself,

" I'll go and see arter Adam, for I canna think where
he's gotten ; an' I want him to go up stairs \vi' me afore it's
dark, for the minutes to look at the corpse is like the meltin'
snow."

Seth overheard this, and, coming into the kitchen again as
his mother rose from her chair, he said,

"Adam's asleep in the workshop, mother. Thee'dst
better not wake him. He was o'erwrought with work and
trouble."

" Wake him ! Who's a-goin' to wake him ? I shanna
wake him wi' lookin' at him. I hanna seen the lad this two
hour — I'd welly forgot as he'd e'ergrowed up from a babby
when's feyther carried him."

Adam was seated on a rough bench, his head supported by
his arm, which rested from the shoulder to the elbow on the
long planing-table in the middle of the workshop. It seemed
as if he had sat down for a few minutes' rest, and had fallen
asleep without slipping from his first attitude of sad, fatigued
thought. His face, unwashed since yesterday, looked pallid
and clammy ; his hair was tossed shaggily about his forehead,
and his closed eyes had the sunken look which follows upon
watching and sorrow. His brow was knit, and his whole face
had an expression of weariness and pain. Gyp was evidently
uneasy, for he sat on his haunches resting his nose on his mas-
ter's stretched-out leg, and dividing the time between licking
the hand that hung listlessly down and glancing with a listen-
ing air toward the door. The poor dog was hungry and rest-
less, but would not leave his master, and was waiting impa-
tiently for some change in the scene. It was owing to this
feeling on Gyp's part that, when Lisbeth came into the work-
shop, and advanced toward Adam as noiselessly as she could,
her intention not to awake him was immediately defeated ; for
Gyp's excitement was too great to find vent in anything short
of a sharp bark, and in a moment Adam opened his eyes and
saw his mother standing before him. It was not very unlike
his dream, for his sleep had been little more than living through
again, in a fevered delirious way, all that had happened since
daybreak, and his mother, with her fretful grief, was present
to him through it all. The chief difference between the
reality and the vision was that, in his dream, Hetty was con-
tinually coming before him in bodily presence, strangely ming-
ling herself as an actor in scenes with which she had nothing

ADAM BEDE.

to do. She was even by the Willow Brook ; she made his
mother angry by coming into the house, and he met her with
her smart clothes quite wet through as he walked in the rain
to Treddleston to tell the coroner. But wherever Hetty
came, his mother was sure to follow soon ; and when he
opened his eyes, it was not at all startling to see her standing
near him.

" Eh, my lad, my lad ! '' Lisbeth burst out immediately,
her wailing impulse returning, for grief in its freshness feels
the need of associating its loss and its lament with everv
change of scene and incident, " Tliee'st got nobody now but
thy old mother to torment thee and be a burden to thee ; thy
poor feyther 'ull ne'er anger thee no more ; an' thy mother
may's well go arter him — the sooner the better — for I'm no
good to nobody now. One old coat 'ull do to patch another,
but it's good for noght else. Thee'dst like t' ha' a wife to
mend thy clothes an' get thy victual, better nor thy old
mother. An' I shall be noght but cumber, a-sittin' i' th' chim-
ney-corner, (Adam winced and moved uneasily ; he dreaded,
of all things, to hear his mother speak of Hetty.) But if thy
feyther had lived, he'd ne'er ha' wanted me to go to make
room fc another, for he could no more ha' done wi'out me
nor one side o' the scithers can do wi'out the tother. Eh, wc
should ha' been both flung away together, an' then I shouldna
ha' seen this day, an' one bun,-in' 'ud ha' done for us both.''

Here Lisbeth paused, but Adam sat in pained silence ; he
could not speak otherwise than tenderly to his mother to-day;
but he could not help being irritated by this plaint. It was
not possible for poor Lisbeth to know how it affected Adam,
any more than it is possible for a wounded dog to know how
his moans affect the nerves of his master. Like all complain-
ing women, she complained in the expectation of being
soothed ; and when Adam said nothing, she was onl}- prompted
to complain more bitterly.

" I know thee couldst do better wi'out me. for thee couldst
go where thee likedst, an' marry them as thee likedst. But I
donna want to say thee nay, let thee bring home who thee
wut ; I'd ne'er open my lips to find faut, for when folks is old
an' o' no use, they may think theirsens well ofif to get the bit
an' the sup. though thev'n to swallow ill words wi't. An' if
thee'st set thy heart on a lass as'll bring thee noght and waste
all, when thee might'st ha' them as 'ud make a man on thee,
I'll say noght, now thy feyther's dead an' drownded, for I'm
no better nor an old haft when the blade's gone,"

lOO ADAM BEDE.

Adam, unable to bear this any longer, rose silently from
the bench, and walked out of the workshop into the kitchen.
But Lisbeth followed him.

"Thee wutna go up stairs an' see thy feyther, then ? I'n
done every thin' now, an' he'd like thee to go an' look at 'm,
for he war always so pleased when thee wast mild to 'm."

Adam turned round at once, and said, "Yes, mother; let
us go up stairs. Come, Seth, let us go together."

They went up stairs, and for five minutes all was silence.
Then the key was turned again, and there was a sound of foot-
steps on the stairs. But Adam did not come down again ; he
was too weary and worn-out to encounter more of his mother's
querulous grief, and he went to rest on his bed. Lisbeth no
sooner entered the kitchen and sat down than she threw her
apron over her head, and began to cry and moan, and rock
herself as before. Scth thought, " She will be quieter by and
b}', now we have been up stairs ; " and he went into the back
kitchen again to tend his little fire, hoping that he should pres-
ently induce her to have some tea.

Lisbeth had been rocking herself in this way for more
than five minutes, giving a low moan with every forward
movement of her body, when she suddenly felt a hand placed
gently on hers, and a sweet treble voice said to her, " Dear
sister, the Lord has sent me to see if I can be a comfort to
you."

Lisbeth paused, in a listening attitude, without removing
her apron from her face. The voice was strange to her. Could
it be her sister's spirit come back to her from the dead after
all those years? She trembled, and dared not look.

Dinah, believing that this pause of wonder was in itself a
relief for the sorrowing woman, said no more just yet, but
quietly took off her bonnet, and then, motioning silence to
Seth, who, on hearing her voice, had come in with a beating
heart, laid one hand on the back of Lisbeth's chair, and leaned
over her, that she might be aware of a friendly presence.

Slowly Lisbeth drew down her apron, and timidly she
opened her dim dark eyes. She saw nothing at first but a
face — a pure, pale face, with loving gray eyes, and it was quite
unknown to her. Her wonder increased ; perhaps it was an
angel. But in the same instant Dinah had laid her hand on
Lisbeth's again, and the old woman looked down at it. It was
a much smaller hand than her own, but it was not white and
delicate, for Dinah liad neverwore a glovp in her life, and her
hand bore the traces of labor from her childhood upward.

ADAM BEDE. lOi

Lisbeth looked earnestly at the hand for a moment, and then,
fixing her eyes again on Dinah's face, said, with something of
restored courage, but in a tone of surprise,

" Why, ye're a workin' woman ! "

" Yes, I am Dinah Morris, and I work in the cotton-mill
when I am at home."

" Ah ! " said Lisbeth slowly, still wondering ; " ye comed
in so light, like the shadow on the wall, an' spoke i' my ear,
as I thought you might be a sperrit. Ye've got a'most the
face of one as is a-sittin' on the grave i' Adam's new Bible."

" I come from the Hall Farm now. You know Mrs. Poy-
ser — she's my aunt, and she has heard of your great affliction,
and is very sorry ; and I'm come to see it I can be any help
to you in your trouble ] for I know your sons Adam and Seth,
and I know you have no daughter, and when the clergyman
told me how the hand of God was heavy upon you, my heart
went out towards you, and I felt a command to come and
be to you in the place of a daughter in this grief, if you will
let me."

" Ah ! I know who y' are now ; y' are a Methody, like
Seth ; he's tould me on you," said Lisbeth, fretfully, her over-
powering sense of pain returning, now her wonder was gone.
" Ye'U make it out as trouble's a good thing, like he allays
does. But Where's the use o' talkin' to me a-that'n ? Ye
canna make the smart less wi' talkin'. Ye'll ne'er make me
believe as it's better for me not to ha' my old man die in 's
bed, if he must die, an' ha' the parson to pray by 'm, and me
to sit by 'm, an' tell him ne'er to mind th' ill words I'n gen him
sometimes when I war angered, an' to gi' 'm a bit an' a sup,
as long as a bit an' a sup he'd swallow. But eh ! to die i' the
could water, an' us close to 'm, an' ne'er to know ; an' me a-
sleepin', as if I ne'er belonged to 'm no more nor if he'd been
a journeyman tramp from nobody knows where."

Here Lisbeth began to cry and rock herself again ; and
Dinah said,

" Yes, dear friend, your affliction is great. It would be
hardness of heart to say that your trouble was not heavy to
bear, God didn't send me to you to make light of your sor-
row, but to mourn with you, if you will let me. If you had a
table spread for a feast, and was making merry with your
friends, you would think it was kind to let me come and sit
down and rejoice with you, because you would think I should
like to share those good things; but I should like better to
share in your trouble and your labor, and it would seem harder

,02 ADAM BEDE.

to me if you denied me that. You won't send me away ?
You're not angry with me for coming ? "

" Nay, nay ; angered ! who said I war angeied ! It war
good on you to come. An' Seth, why donna ye get her some
tay .'' Ye war in a hurry to get some for me, as had no need,
but ye donna think o' gettin' 't for them as wants it. Sit ye
down ; sit ye down. I thank ye kindly for comin', for it's little
wage ye get by walkin' through the wet fields to see an old

woman like me Nay, I'n got no daughter o' my own —

ne'er had one — an' I warna sorry, for they're poor queechy
things, gells is ; I allays wanted to ha' lads, as could fend for
theirsens. An' the lads 'uU be marryin' — I shall ha' daughters
enoo, and too many. But now, do ye make the tay as ye like
it, for I'n got no taste in my mouth this day ; it's all one what
I swaller — it's all got the laste o' sorrow wi't."

Dinah took care not to betray that she had had her tea, and
accepted Lisbeth's invitation very readily, for the sake of per
suading the old woman herself to take the food and drink she
so much needed after a day of hard work and fasting.

Seth was so iiappy now Dinah was in the house that he
could not help thinking her presence was worth purchasing
witli a life in which grief incessantly followed upon grief ; but
the next moment he reproached himself ; it was almost as if
he were rejoicing in his father's sad death. Nevertheless, the
joy of being with Dinah would Xx\m\x\'^\\ ; it was like the influ-
ence of climate, which no resistance can overcome. And the
feeling even suffused itself over his face so as to attract his
mother's notice while she was drinking her tea.

" Thee may'st well talk o' trouble bein' a good thing, Seth,
for thee thriv'st on't. Thee look'st as if thee know'dst no more
o' care an' cumber nor when thee wast a babby a-lyin' awake
i' th' cradle. For thee'dst allays lie still wi' thy eyes open,
an' Adam ne'er 'ud lie still a minute when he wakened. Thee
wast allays like a bag o' meal as can ne'er be bruised, though,
for the matter o' that, thy poor feyther were just such another.
But j'(?'ve got the same look too " (here Lisbeth turned to Di-
nah) ; " I rackon it's wi' bein' a Methody. Not as I'm a-find-
in' fau't wi' ye for ye've no call to be frettin', an' somehow ye
looken sorry too. Eh 1 well, if the Methodies are fond o'
trouble, they're like to thrive ; it's a pity they canna ha't all,
and take it away from them as donna like it. I would ha'
gi'en 'em plenty ; for when I'd gotten my old man I war wor-
reted from morn till night ; and now he's gone, I'd be glad
(or the worse o'er again."

ADAM BEDE. 103

"Yes, said Dinah, careful not to oppose any feeling of
Lisbeth's, for her reliance, in her smallest words and deeds,
on a divine guidance, always issued in that finest woman's
tact which proceeds from acute and ready sympathy — "yes;
I remember, too, when my dear aunt died, 1 longed for the
sounds of her bad cough in the nights, instead of the silence
that came when she was gone. But now, dear friend, drink
this other cup of tea and eat a little more."

"What," said Lisbeth, taking the cup, and speaking in a
less querulous tone, " had ye got no feyther and mother, then,
as ye war so sorry about your aunt ? "

" No, I never knew a father or mother ; my aunt brought me
up from a baby. She had no children, for she vias ne\er mar-
ried, and she brought me up as tenderly as if I'd been her own
child."

" Eh ! she'd fine work vvi' ye, I'll warrant, bringing ye up
from a babby, an' her a lone woman ; it's ill bringin' up a cade
lamb. But I dare say ye warna franzy, for ye look as if ve'd
ne'er been angered i' your life. But what did ye do w'hen
your aunt died? an' why didna ye come to live i' thiscountrv.
bein' as Mrs. Poyser's your aunt too ? "

Dinah, seeing that Lisbeth's attention was attracted, told
her the story of her early life — how she had been brought up
to work hard, and what sort of place Snowfield was, and how
many people had a hard life there — all the details that she
thought likely to interest Lisbeth. The old woman listened,
and forgot to be fretful, unconsciously subject to the soothing
influence of Dinah's face and voice. After a while she was
persuaded to let the kitchen be made tidy ; for Dinah was bent
on this, believing that the sense of order and quietude around
her would help in disposing Lisbeth to join in the prayer she
longed to pour forth at her side. Seth, meanwhile, went out to
chop wood ; for he surmised that Dinah would like to be left
alone with his mother.

Lisbeth sat watching her as she moved about in her still,
quick way, and said, at last, " Ye've got a notion o' cleanin' up.
I wouldna mind ha'in'ye for a daughter, for ye wouldna spend
the lad's wage i' fine clothes an' waste. Ye're not like the
lasses o' this country-side. I reckon folks is different at Snow-
field from what they are here."

"They have a different sort of life, many of 'em," said
Dinah ; " they work at different things — some in the mill, and
many in the mines, in the villages round about. But the heart
of man is the same everywhere, and there are the children of

I04

ADAM BEDE.

this world and the children of light there as well as else«
where. But we've many more Methodists there than in this
country."

" Well, I didna know as the Methody women were like ye,
for there's Will Maskery's wife, as they say's a big Methody,
isna pleasant to look at at all. I'd as lief look at a tooad. An'
I'mthinkin'I wouldna mind if ye'd stay an' sleep here, for I
should like to see ye i' th' house i' th' mornin'. But may hap-
pen they'll be jookin' for ye at Mester Poyser's."

" No," said Dinah, " they don't expect me, and I should like
to stay, if you'll let me."

" Well, there's room ; I'n got my bed laid i' th' little room
o'er the back kitchen, an' ye can lie beside me. I'd be glad to
ha' ye wi' me to speak to i' th' night, for ye've got a nice way
o' talkin'. It puts me i' mind o' the swallows as was under
the thack last 'ear, when they fust begun to sing low an' soft-
like i' th' mornin'. Eh, but my old man war fond o' them
birds ! an' so war Adam, but they'n ne'er comed again this
'ea'^. Happen they're dead too."

" There," said Dinah, " now the kitchen looks tidy, and now,
dea»" mother — for I'm your daughter to-night, you know — 1
should like you to wash your face and have a clean cap on.
Do you remember what David did when God took away his
child from him ? While the child was yet alive he fasted and
prayed to God to spare it, and he would neither eat nor drink,
but lay on the ground all night, beseeching for the child. But
when he knew it was dead, he rose up from the ground and
washed and anointed himself, and changed his clothes, and
ate and drank; and when they asked him how it was that he
seemed to have left off grieving now the child was dead, he
said, ' While the child was yet alive, I fasted and wept ; for I
said. Who can tell whether God will be gracious to me, that
the child may live ? But now he is dead, why should I fast ?
can I bring him back again ? I shall go to him, but he shall
not return to me.' "

" Eh, that's a true word ! " said Lisbeth. " Yes, my old man
wonna come back to me, but I shall go to him — the sooner the
better. Well, ye may do as ye like wi' me ; there's a clean cap
i' that drawer, an' I'll go i' the back kitchen an' wash my face.
An', Seth, thee may'st reach down Adam's new Bible wi' th'
picters in, an' she shall read us a chapter. Eh, I like them
words — I shall go to him, but he vvonna come back to me."

Dinah and Seth were both inwardly offering thanks for the
greater quietness of spirit that had come over Lisbeth. This

ADAAf REDE. 105

was what Dinah had been trying to bring about, through all her
still sympathy and absence from exhortation. From her girl-
hood upward she had had experience among the sick and the
mourning, among minds hardened and shriveled through pov-
erty and ignorance, and had gained the subtlest perception of
the mode in which they could best be touched, and softened
into willingness to receive words of spiritual consolation or
warning. As Dinah expressed it, " She was never left to her-
self, but it was always given her when to keep silence and
when to speak." And do we not all agree to call rapid thought
and noble impulse by the name of inspiration ? After our sub-
tlest analysis of the mental process, we must still say, as Dinah
did, that our highest thoughts and our best deeds are all given
to us.

And so there was earnest prayer — there was faith, love, and
hope pouring itself forth that evening in the little kitchen.
And poor, aged, fretful Lisbeth, without grasping any distinct
idea, without going through any course of religious emotions,
felt a vague sense of goodness and love, and of something right
lying underneath and beyond all this sorrowing life.

She couldn't understand the sorrow ; but, for these moments,
under the subduing influence of Dinah's spirit, she felt that she
must be patient and still.

CHAPTER XL

IN THE COTTAGE.

It was but half past four the next morning when Dinah,
tired of lying awake listening to the birds, and watching the
growing light through' the little window in the garret "roof,
rose and began to dress herself very quietly, lest she should
disturb Lisbeth. But already some one else was astir in the
house, and gone down stairs preceded by Gyp. The dog's
pattering step was a sure sign that it was Adam who went
down ; but Dinah was not aware of this, and she thought it
was more likely to be Seth, for he had told her how Adam
had staid up working the night before. Seth, however, had
only just awaked at the sound of the opening door. The
exciting influence of the previous day, heightened at last by

lo6 ADAM BEDS.

Dinah's unexpected presence, had not been counteracted by
any bodily weariness, for he had not done his ordinary amount
of hard work ; and so, when he went to bed, it was not till
he had tired himself with hours of tossing wakefulness that
drowsiness came, and led on a heavier morning sleep than
was usual with him.

But Adam had been refreshed by his long rest, and with
his habitual impatience of mere passivity, he was eager to
begin the new day, and subdue sadness by his strong will and
strong arm. The white mist lay in the valley ; it was going
to be a bright, warm day, and he would start to work again
when he had had his breakfast.

" There's nothing but what's bearable as long as a man
can work," he said to himself ; " the nature o' things doesn't
change, though it seems as if one's own life was nothing but
change. The square o' four is sixteen, and you must lengthen
your lever in proportion to your weight, is as true when a man's
miserable as when he's happy ; and the best o' working is, it
gives you a grip hold o' things outside your own lot."

As he dashed the cold water over his head and face, he
felt completely himself again, and with his black eyes as keen
as ever, and his thick black hair all glistening with the fresh
moisture, he went into the workshop to look out the wood for
his father's coffin, intending that he and Seth should carry it
with them to Jonathan Burge's, and have the coffin made by-
one of the workmen there, so that his mother might not see
and hear the sad task going forward at home.

He had just gone into the workshop when his quick ear
detected a light rapid foot on the stairs — certainly not his
mother's. He had been in bed and asleep when Dinah had
come in in the evening, and now he wondered whose step this
could be. A foolish thought came and moved him strangely.
As if it could be Hetty ! She was the last person likely to be
in the house. And yet he felt reluctant to go and look, and
have the clear proof that it was some one else. He stood
leaning on a plank he had taken hold of, listening to sounds
which his imagination interpreted for him so pleasantly that
the keen strong face became suffused with a timid tenderness.
The light footstep moved about the kitchen, followed by the
sound of the sweeping-brush, hardly making so much noise as
the lightest breeze that chases the autumn leaves along the
dusty path ; and Adam's imagination saw a dimpled face, with
dark bright eyes and roguish smiles, looking backward at this
brush, and a rounded figure just leaning a little to clasp the

ADAM BEDE. ,07

handle. A very foolish thought— it could not be Hetty ; but
the only way of dismissing such nonsense from his head was
to go and see who it was, for his fancy only got nearer and
nearer to belief while he stood there listening. He loosed the
plank, and went to the kitchen door.

" How do you do, Adam Bede 1 " said Dinah, in her calm
treble, pausing from her sweeping, and fixing her mild grave
eyes upon him. " I trust you feel rested and strengthened
again to bear the burden and heat of the day."

" It was like dreaming of the sunshine, and awaking in the
moonlight. Adam had seen Dinah several times, but always
at the Hall Farm, where he was not very vividly conscious of
any woman's presence except Hetty's, and he had only in the
last day or two begun to suspect that Seth was in love with
her, so that his attention had not hitherto been drawn toward
her for his brother's sake. But now her slim figure, her plain
black gown, and her pale serene face, impressed him with all
the force that belongs to a reality contrasted with a pre-occu-
•pying fancy. For the first moment or two he made no answer,
but looked at her with the concentrated, examining glance
which a man gives to an object in which he has suddenly be-
gun to be interested. Dinah, for the first time in her life, felt
a painful self-consciousness; there was something in the dark
penetrating glance of this strong man so different from the
mildness and timidity of his brother Seth. A faint blush
came, which deepened as she wondered at it. This blush re-
called Adam from his forgetfulness.

" I was quite taken by surprise ; it was very good of you
to come and see my mother in her trouble," he said in a gentle,
grateful tone, for his quick mind told him at once how she
came to be there. " I hope my mother was thankful to have
you," he added, wondering rather anxiously what had been
Dinah's reception.

" Yes," said Dinah, resuming her work, " she seemed
greatly comforted after a while, and she's had a good deal of
rest in the night by times. She was fast asleep when I left
her."

" Who was it took the news to the Hall Farm ? " said
Adam, his thoughts reverting to some one there : he wondered
whether s/ie had felt anything about it.

" It was Mr. Irwine, the clergyman, told me, and my aunt
was grieved for your mother when she heard it, and wanted
me to come ; and so is my uncle, I'm sure, now he's heard it,
but he was gone out to Rosseter all yesterday. They'll look

lo8 ADA AT BEDE.

for you there as soon as you've got time to go, foi there's no-
body round that hearth but what's glad to see you."

Dinah, with her sympathetic divination, knew quite well
that Adam was longing to hear if Hetty had said anything
about their trouble ; she was too rigorously truthful for benev-
olent invention, but she had contrived to say something in
which Hetty was tacitly included. Love has a way of cheating
itself consciously, like a child who plays at solitary hide-and-
seek ; it is pleased with assurances that it all the while dis-
believes. Adam liked what Dinah had said so much that his
mind was directly full of the next visit he should pay to the
Hall Farm, when Hetty would, perhaps, behave more kindly
to him than she had ever done before.

" But you won't be there yourself any longer ? " he said
to Dinah.

" No, I go back to Snowfield on Saturday, and I shall
have to set out to Treddleston early, to be in time for the
Oakbourne carrier. So I must go back to the farm to-night,
that I may have the last day with my aunt and her children.
But I can stay here all to-day if your mother would like me ;
and her heart seemed inclined toward me last night."

" Ah ! then, she's sure to want you to-day. If mother
takes to people at the beginning, she's sure to get fond of
'em ; but she's a strange way of not liking young women.
Though, to be sure," Adam went on smiling, " her not liking
other young women is no reason why she shouldn't like you."

Hitherto Gyp had been assisting at this conversation in
motionless silence, seated on his haunches, and alternately
looking up in his master's face to watch its expression, and
observing Dinah's movements about the kitchen. The kind
smile with which Adam uttered the last words was apparently
decisive with Gyp of the light in which the stranger was to be
regarded ; and, as she turned round after putting aside her
sweeping-brush, he trotted toward her, and put his muzzle
against her hand in a friendly way.

" You see Gyp bids you welcome," said Adam, "and he's
very slow to welcome strangers."

" Poor dog ! " said Dinah, patting the rough, gray coat,
" I've a strange feeling about the dumb things as if they
wanted to speak, and it was a trouble to 'em because they
couldn't. I can't help being sorry for the dogs always, though,
perhaps, there's no need. But they may well have more in
them then they know how to make us understand, for we can't
say half what we feel, with all our words."

ADAM BEDE. ^OC)

Seth came down now, and was pleased to find Adam talking
with Dinah ; he wanted Adam to know how much better she
was than all other women. But after a few words of greeting
Adam drew him into the workshop to consult about the coffin,
and Dinah went on with her cleaning.

By six o'clock they were all at breakfast with Lisbeth, in
a kitchen as clean as she could have made it herself. The
window and door were open, and the morning air brought
with it a mingled scent of southern-wood, thyme, and sweet-
briar from the path of garden by the side of the cottage.
Dinah did not sit down at first, but moved about serving the
others with the warm porridge and the toasted oat-cake, which
she had got ready in the usual way, for she had asked Seth
to tell her just what his mother gave them for breakfast.
Lisbeth had been usually silent since she came down stairs,
apparently requiring some time to adjust her ideas to a state
of things in which she came down like a lady to find all the
work done, and sat still to be waited on. Her'new sensations
seemed to exclude the remembrance of her grief. At last,
after tasting the porridge, she broke silence :

" Ye might ha' made the parridge worse," she said to
Dinah ; " 1 can ate it wi'out it's turnin' my stomach. It might
ha' been a trifle thicker an' no harm, an' I allays putten a
sprig o' mint in mysen ; but how's ye t' know that "i Th'
lad arena like to get folks as 'ull make their parridge as I'n
made it for 'em ; it's well if they get onybody as 'ull make
parridge at all. But ye might do wi' a bit o' showin ; for
ye're a stirrin' body in a mornin', an' ye've a light heel, an'
ye've cleaned th' house well enoof for a ma'shift."

" Makeshift, mother ! " said Adam. " Why, 1 think the
house looks beautiful. I don't know how it could look better."

"Thee dostna know. Nay, how's thee to know.? Th'
men ne'er know whether the floor is cleaned or cat-licked.
But thee't know when thee gets thy parridge burnt, as thee't
like ha' it when I'n gi'en o'er makin' it. Thee't think thy
mother war good for sommat then."

" Dinah," said Seth, "do come and sit down now and
have your breakfast. \\'e're all served now."

" Ay, come an' sit ye down, do," said Lisbeth, " an' ate
a morsel ; ye'd need, arter bein' upo' your legs this hour an'
half a'ready. Come, then," she added, in a tone of complain-
ing affection, as Dinah sat down by her side, " I'll be loath
for ye t' go, but ye canna stay much longer, I doubt. I could
put up wi' ye i' th' house better nor wi' most folks."

,lo ADAM BEDS.

•' I'll Stay till to-night if you're willing," said Dinah. " I'd
stay longer, only I'm going back to Snowfield on Saturday,
and I must be with my aunt to-morrow."

" Eh ! I'd ne'er go back to that country. My old man
come from that Stonyshire side, but he left it when he war a
young un, an' i' the right on't too : for he said as there war
no wood there, an' it 'ud ha' been a bad country for a caii
penter."

" Ah ! " said Adam, " I remember father telling me, when
I was a little lad. that he made up his mind if ever he moved
it should be south'ard. But I'm not so sure about it. Bartle
Massey says — and he knows the south — as the northern men
are a finer breed than the southern, harder-hearted and stron-
ger-bodied, and a deal taller. And then he says in some o'
those counties it's as flat as the back o' your hand, and you
can see nothing of a distance without climbing up the highest
trees. I couldn't abide that ; I like to go to work by a road
that'll take me up a bit of a hill, and see the fields for miles
round me, and a bridge or a town, or a bit of steeple here and
there. It makes you feel the world's a big place, and there's
other men working in it with their heads and hands besides
yourself."

" I like the hills best," said Seth, " when the clouds are
over your head, and you see the sun shining ever so far off,
over the Loamford way, as I've often done o' late, on the
stormy days ; it seems to me as if that was heaven, where
there's always joy and sunshine, though this life's dark and
cloudy."

" Oh, I love the Stonj'shire side," said Dinah ; " I shouldn't
like to set my face towards the countries where they're rich
in corn and cattle, and the ground so level and easy to tread,
and to turn my back on the hills where the poor people have
to live such a hard life, and the men spend their days in the
mines away from the sunlight It's very blessed on a bleak,
cold day, when the sky is hanging dark over the hill, to feel
the love of God in one's soul, and carry it to the lonely, bare,
stone houses, where there's nothing else to give comfort."

" Eh ! " said Lisbeth, " that's very well for ye to talk, as
looks welly like the snowdrop flowers as ha' lived for days an'
days when I'n gathered 'em, wi' nothing but a drop o' water
an' a peep o' daylight ; but the hungry foulks had better leave
th' hungry country. It makes less mouths for the scant cake.
"But," she went on, looking at Adam, "donna thee talk o'
goin' south'ard or north'ard, an' leavin' thy feyther an' mother

ADAM BEDE. HI

i' the churchyard, an' goin' to a country they know nothin' on.
I'll ne'er rest i' my grave if I donna see thee i' th' church-
yard of a Sunday."

" Donna fear, mother," said Adam. " If I hadna made
up my mind not to jjo, I should ha' been gone before now."

He had finished his breakfast now, and rose as he was
speaking.

" What art goin' to do ? " asked Lisbeth. " Set about thy
feyther's coffin ? "

" No. mother," said Adam ; " we're going to take the wood
to the village, and have it made there."

" Nay, my lad, nay,*' Lisbeth burst out in an eager, wail-
ing tone, " thee wotiia let nobody make thy feyther's coffin
but thysen } Who'd make it so well ? An' him as know'd
what good work war, an's got a son as is th' head o' the vil-
lage, an' all Trcddles'on too, for cleverness."

"Very well, mother; if that's thy wish, I'll make the
coffin at home ; but 1 iUought thee wouldstna like to hear the
work going on."

"An' why shouldna I like 't ? It's the right thing to be
done. An' what's likin' got to do wi't } It's choice o' mi.s-
likin's is all Vn got i' this world. One mossel's as good as
another when your mouth's out o' taste. Thee maun set
about it now this morning fust thing. I wunna ha' nobody
to touch the coffin but tl'iee."

Adam's eyes met Seth's, which looked from Dinah to \\m\
rather wistfully.

" No, mother," he saii. '• I'll not consent but Seth shall
have a hand in it too. if it's to be done at home. I'll go to
the village this forenoon, because Mr. Burge 'ull want to see
me, and Seth shall stay at home and begin the coffin. I can
come back at noon, and then he can go."

"Nay, nay," persisted Lisbeth, beginning to cry, " I'n set
my heart on't as thee shalt ma' thy feyther's coffin. Thee't
so stiff an' masterful, thee't ne'er do as thy mother wants
thee. Thee wast often angered wi' thy feyther when he war
alive ; thee must be the better to 'm, now he's goen'. He'd
ha thought nothin' on't for Seth to ma'scoffin."

"Say no more, Adam, ^ay no more," said Seth, gently,
though his voice told that he spoke with some effort ; " moth-
er's in the right. I'll go to work, and do thee stay at home."

He passed into the workshop immediately, followed by
Adam ; while Lisbeth, automatically obeying her old habits,
began to put away the breakfast things, as if she did not mean

112 ADAM BEDE.

Dinah to take her place any longer. Dinah said nothing, but
presently used the opportunity of quietly joining the brothers
in the workshop.

They had already got on their aprons and paper caps, and
Adam was standing with his left hand on Seth's shoulder,
while he pointed with the hammer in his right to some boards
which they were looking at. Their backs were turned toward
the door by which Dinah entered, and she came in so gently
that they were not aware of her presence till they heard her
voice saying, " Seth Bede ! " Seth started, and they both
turned round. Dinah looked as if she did not see Adam, and
fixed her eyes on Seth's face, saying, with calm kindness,

'• 1 won't say farewell. I shall see you again w^hen you
come from work. So as I'm at the farm before dark, it will
be quite soon enough."

" Thank you, Dinah ; I should like to walk home with you
once more. It'll perhaps be the last time."

There was a little tremor in Seth's voice. Dinah put out
her hand and said, " You'll have sweet peace in your mind
to-day, Seth, for your tenderness and long suffering toward
your i'.ged mother."

She turned round and left the workshop as quickly and
quietly as she had entered it. Adam had been observing her
closely all the while, but she had not looked at him. As
soon as she was gone, he said,

" I don't wonder at thee for loving her, Seth. She's got
a face like a lily."

Seth's soul rushed to his eyes and lips ; he had never yet
confessed his secret to Adam, but now he felt a delicious
sense of disburdenment, as he answered,

" Ay, Addy, I do love her — too much, I doubt. But she
doesna love me, lad, only as one child o' God loves another.
She'll never love any man as a husband — that's my belief."

" Nay, lad, there's no telling ; thee mustna lose heart.
She's made out of stuff with a finer grain than most o' the
women; I can see that clear enough. But if she's better than
they are in other things, I canna think she'll fall short of 'em
in loving."

No more was said. Seth set out to the village, and Adam
began his work on the coffin.

" God help the lad, and me too," he thought, as he lifted
the board. " We're like enough to find life a tough job —
hard work inside and out. It's a strange thing to think of a
man as can lift a chair with his teeth, and walk fifty mile on

ADAM BEDE. TI3

end, trembling and turning hot and cold at only a look from
one woman out of all the rest i' the world. It's a mystery
we can give no account of ; but no more we can of the
sprouting o' the seed, for that matter."

CHAPTER XII.

IN THE WOOD.

That same Thursday morning, as Arthur Donnithorne
was moving about in his dressing-room, seeing his well-looking
British person reflected in the old-fashioned mirrors, and
stared at, from a dingy olive-green piece of tapestry, by Pha-
roah's daughter and her maidens, who ought to have been
minding the infant Moses, he was holding a discussion with
himself° which, by the time his valet was tying the black silk
sling over his shoulder, had issued in a distinct practical res-
olution.

" I mean to go to Eagledale and fish for a week or so,"
he said, aloud. " I shall take you with me, Pym, and set off
this morning; so be ready by half-past eleven."

The lo.v whistle, which had assisted him in arriving at
this resolution, here broke out into his loudest ringing tenor,
and the corridor, as he hurried along it, echoed to his fav-
orite song from the " Beggar's Opera," " When the heart of a
man is oppressed with care." Not an heroic strain ; never-
theless, Arthur felt himself very heroic as he strode toward
the stables to give his orders about his horses. His own ap-
probation was necessary to him, and it was not an approbation
to be enjoyed quite gratuitously ; it must be won by a fair
amount of merit. He had never yet forfeited that approbation,
and he had considerable reliance on his own virtues. No
young man could confess his faults more candidly ; candor
was one of his favorite virtues ; and how can a man's candor
be seen in all its lustre unless he has a few failings to talk of ?
But he had an agreeable confidence that his faults were all of
a generous kind — impetuous, warm-blooded, leonine; never
crawling, crafty, reptilian. It was not possible for Arthur
Donnithorne to do anything mean, dastardly, or cruel. " No !
I'm a devil of a fellow for getting myself into a hobble, but I
alv/ays taks care the load shall fall on my own shoulders,"

114

ADAM BEDS.

Unhappily, there is no inherent poetical justice in hobbles,
and they will sometimes obstinately refuse to inflict their worst
consequences on the prime offender in spite of his loudly ex-
pressed wish. It was entirely owing to this deficiency
in the scheme of things that Arthur had ever brought any one
into trouble besides himself. He was nothing, if not good-
natured ; and all his pictures of the future, when he should
come into the estate, were made up of a prosperous, contented
tenantry, adoring their landlord, who would be the model of
an English gentleman — mansion in first-rate order, all elegance
and high taste- — jolly housekeeping — finest stud in Loarashire
— purse open to all public objects — in short, everything as
different as possible from what was now ascociated with the
name of Donnithorne. And one of the first good actions he
would perform in that future should be to increase Irwine's
income for the vicarage of Hayslope, so that he might keep
a carriage for his mother and sisters. His hearty affection
for the rector dated from the age of frocks and trousers. It
was an affection, partly filial, partly fraternal — fraternal
enough to make him like Irwine's company better than that
of most younger men, and filial enough to make him shrmk
strongly from incurring Irwine's disapprobation.

You perceive that Arthur Donnithorne was " a good fellow"
— all his college friends thought him such ; he couldn't bear
to see any]one uncomfortable ; he would have been very sorry
even in his angriest moods for any harm to happen to his grand-
father ; and his aunt Lydia herself had the benefit of that soft-
heartedness which he bore toward the whole sex. Whether
he would have self-mastery enough to be always as harn.less
and purely beneficent as his good-nature led him to desire, was
a question that no one had yet decided against him ; he was
but twenty-one, you remember ; and we don't inquire too
closely into character in the case of a handsome, generous
young fellow, who will have property enough to support nu-
merous peccadilloes — who, if he should unfortunately break a
man's legs in his rash driving, will be able to pension him hand-
somely ; or, if he should happen to spoil a woman's existence
for her, will make it up to her with expensive bon-bons, packed
up and directed by his own hand. It would be ridiculous to
be prying and analytic in such cases, as if one were inquiring
into the character of a confidential clerk. We use round, gen-
eral, gentlemanly epithets about a young man of birth and for-
tune ; and ladies, with that fine intuition wliich is the distin-
euishing attribute of their sex, see at once that he is '* nice."

ADAM BEDE.

The chances are that he will go through life without scandal-
izing any one^ — a sea-worthy vessel that one would refuse to
insure. Ships, certainly, are liable to casualties, which some-
times make terribly evident some flaw in their construction
that would never have been discoverable in smooth water ;
and many a " good fellow," through a disastrous combination
of circumstances, has undergone a like betrayal.

But we have no fair ground for entertaining unfavorable
auguries concerning Arthur Donnithorne, who this morning
proves himself capable of a prudent resolution founded on
conscience. One thing is clear : Nature has taken care that
he shall never go far astray with perfect comfort and satisfac-
tion to himself ; he will never get beyond that border-land of
sin, where he will be perpetually harassed by assaults from the
other side of the boundary. He will never be a courtier of
Vice, and wear her orders in his button-hole.

It was about ten o'clock, and the sun was shining bril-
liantly ; everything was looking lovelier for the yesterday's rain.
It is a pleasant thing on such a morning to walk along the
well-rolled gravel on one's way to the stables, meditating an
excursion. But the scent of the stables, which, in a natural
state of things, ought to be among the soothing influences of
a man's life, always brought with it some irritation to Arthur.
There was no having his own way in the stables ; everything
was managed in the stingiest fashion. His grandfather per-
sisted in retaining as head groom an old dolt whom no sort of
lever could move out of his old habits, and who was allowed to
hire a succession of raw Loamshire lads as his subordinates,
one of whom had lately tested a new pair of shears by clip-
ping an oblong patch on Arthur's bay mare. This state of
things is naturally imbittering ; one can put up with annoy-
ances in the house, but to have the stable made a scene of
vexation and disgust, is a point beyond what human flesh and
blood can be expected to endure long together without danger
of misanthropy.

Old John's wooden, deep-wrinkled face was the first object
that met Arthur's eyes as he entered the stable-yard, and it
quite poisoned for him the bark of the two blood-hounds that
kept watch there. He could never speak quite patiently to
the old blockhead.

" You must have Meg saddled for me and brought to the
door at half-past eleven ; and I shall want Rattler saddled for
Pym at the same time. Do you hear?"

" Yes, I hear, I hear, cap'n," said old John, very deliber-

Ii6 ADAM BEDE.

ately following the young master into the stable, John con
sidered a young master as the natural enemy of an old servant,
and young people in general as a poor contrivance for carry-
ing on the world.

Arthur went in for the sake of patting Meg, declining as far
as possible to see anything in the stables, lest he should lose
his temper before breakfast. The pretty creature was in one
of the inner stables, and turned her mild head as her master
came beside her. Little Trot, a tiny spaniel, her inseparable
companion in the stable, was comfortably curled up on her
back.

'" Well, Meg, my pretty girl," said Arthur, patting her neck,
" we'll have a glorious canter this morning."

"Nay, your honor, I donna see as that can be," said John.

" Not be ! why not .? "

"Why she's got lamed."

" Lamed, confound you I what do you mean ? "

" Why, th' lad took her too close to Dalton's bosses, an'
one on 'em flung out at her, an' she's got her shank bruised
o' near the fore leg."

The judicious historian abstains from narrating precisely
what ensued. You understand that there was a great deal of
strong language, mingled with soothing" who-ho's " while the
leg was examined ; that John stood by with quite as much
emotion as if he had been a cunningly-carved crab-tree walking-
stick, and that Arthur Donnithorne presently repassed the
iron gates of the pleasure ground without singing as he went.

He considered himself thoroughly disappointed and an-
noyed. There was not another mount in the stable for him-
self and his servant besides Meg and Rattler. It was vex-
atious ; just when he wanted to get out of the way for a week or
two. It seemed culpable in Providence to allow such a com-
bination of circumstances. To be shut up at the Chase with
a broken arm, when every other fellow in his regiment was
enjoying himself at Windsor — shut up with his grandfather,
who had the same sort of affection for him as for his parch-
ment deeds ! And to be disgusted at every turn with the
management of the house and the estate ! In such circum-
stances a man necessarily gets in an ill humor, and works ofif
the irritation by some excess of other. " Salkeld would ha\e
drunk a bottle of port every day," he muttered to himself;
"but I'm not well seasoned enough for that. Well, since I
can't go to Eagledale, I'll have a gallop on Rattler to Nor-
burne this mornins: and lunch with Gawaine."

ADAM BEDE.

117

Behind this explicit resolution there lay an implicit one.
If he lunched with Gawaine and lingered chatting, he would
not reach the Chase again till nearly five, when Hetty would
be safe out of his sight in the housekeeper's room ; and when
she set out to go home, it would be his lazy time after dinner,
so he should keep out of her way altogether. There really
would have been no harm in being kind to the little thing, and
it wasAvorth dancing with a dozen ball-room belles only to look
at Hetty for half an hour. But, perhaps, he had better not
take any more notice of her ; it might put notions into her
head, as Irwine had hinted ; though Arthur, for his part,
thought girls were not by any means io soft and easily bruised ;
indeed, he had generally found them twice as cool and cun-
ning as he was himself. As for any real harm in Hetty's
case, it was out of the question ; Arthur Donnithorne accepted
his own bond for himself with perfect confidence.

So the twelve o'clock sun saw him galloping tow'ard Nor-
burne ; and by good fortune Halsell Common lay in his road,
and gave him some fine leaps for Rattler. Nothing like "tak-
ing " a few brushes and ditches for exorcising a demon ; and
it is really astonishing that the Centaurs, with their immense
advantages in this way, have left so bad a reputation in
history.

After this, you will perhaps be surprised to hear that,
although Gawaine was at home, the hand of the dial in the
court-yard had scarcely cleared the last stroke of three, when
Arthur returned through the entrance-gates, got down from
the panting Rattler, and went into the house to take a hasty
luncheon. But I believe there have been men since his day
who have ridden a long way to avoid a rencounter, and then
galloped hastily back lest they should miss it. It is the
favorite stratagem of our passions to sham a retreat, and to
turn sharp round upon us at the moment we have made up our
minds that the day is our own.

" The cap'n's been ridin' the devil's own pace," said Dal-
ton, the coachman — whose person stood out in high relief, as
he smoked his pipe, against the stable wall — when John
brought up Rattler,

" An' I wish he'd get the devil to do's grooming for'n,"
growled John.

" Ay ; he'd hev a deal hamabler groom nor what he hes
now," observed Dalton ; and the joke appeared to him so
good, that, being left alone upon the scene, he continued at
intenals to take his pipe from his mouth in order to wink at

lig ADAM BEDE.

an imaginary audience, and shake luxuriously with a silent,
ventral laughter ; mentally rehearsing the dialogue from the
beginning, that he might recite it with effect in the servants'
hall.

When Arthur went up to his dressing-room again after
luncheon, it was inevitable that the debate he had had with
himself there earlier in the day should flash across his mind ;
but it was impossible for him now to dwell on the remem-
brance— impossible to call the feelings and reflections which
had been decisive with him then, any more than to recall the
peculiar scent of the air that had fastened him when he first
opened his window. The desire to see Hetty had rushed
back like an ill-stemmed current ; he was amazed himself at
the force with which this trivial fancy seemed to grasp him ;
he was even rather tremulous as he brushed his hair — pooh 1
it was riding in that breakneck way. It was because he had
made a serious affair of an idle matter, by thinking of it as if it
were of any consequence. He would amuse himself by seeing
Hetty to-day, and get rid of the whole thing from his mind. It
was all Irwine's fault. " If Irwine had said nothing, I shouldn't
have thought half as much of Hetty as of Meg's lameness."
However, it was just the sort of day for lolling in the Hermit-
age, and he would go and finish Dr. Moore's Zeluco there before
dinner. The Hermitage stood in Fir-tree Grove^the way
Hetty was sure to come in walking from the Hall Farm. So
nothing could be simpler and more natural ; meeting Hetty
was a mere circumstance of his walk, not its object.

Arthur's shadow flitted rather faster among the sturdy
oaks of the Chase than might have been expected from the
shadow of a tired man on a warm afternoon, and it was still
scarcely four o'clock when he stood before the tall, narrow
gate leading into the delicious labyrinthine wood which
skirted one side of the Chase, and which was called Fir-
tree Grove, not because the firs were many, but because they
were few. It was a wood of beeches and limes, with here
and there a light, silver-stemmed birch— just the sort of wood
most haunted by the nymphs ; you see their white, sun-lit
limbs gleaming athwart the boughs, or peeping from behmd
the smooth-sweeping outline of a tall lime ; you hear their
soft, liquid laughter ; but if you look with a too curious, sac-
rilegious eye, they vanish behind the silvery beeches, they
make vou believe that their voice was only a running brook-
let, peVhaps they metamorphose themselves into a tawny
squirrel that scampers away and mocks you from the top-

ADAM BEDB.

119

most bough. Not a gioVe with measured grass or rolled
gravel for you to tread upon, but with narrow, hollow-shaped,
earthy paths, edged with faint dashes of delicate moss — paths
which look as if they were made by the free-will of the trees
and underwood, moving reverently aside to look at the tall
queen of the white-footed nymphs.

It was along the broadest of these paths that Arthur Don-
nithorne passed, under an avenue of limes and beeches. It
was a still afternoon ; the golden light was lingering languidly
among the upper boughs, only glancing down here and there
on the purple pathway and its edge of faintly-sprinkled moss ;
an afternoon in which destiny disguises her cold, awful face
behind a hazy, radiant veil, incloses us in warm, downy wings,
and poisons us with violet-scented breath. Arthur strolled
along carelessly, with a book under his arm, but not looking
on the ground as meditative men are apt to do ; his eyes
would fix themselves on the distant bend in the road, round
which a little figure must surely appear before long. Ah !
there she comes ; first, a bright patch of color, like a tropic
bird among the boughs ; then a tripping figure, with a round
hat on, and a small basket under her arm ; then a deep-
blushing, almost frightened, but bright-smiling girl, making
her curtsey with a fluttered yet happy glance, as Arthur
came up to her. If Arthur had had ^im'e to think at all, he
would have thought it strange that he should feel fluttered
too, be conscious of blushing too — in fact, look and feel as
foolish as if he had been taken by surprise instead of meeting
just what he expected. Poor things ! It was a pity they
were not in that golden age of childhood when they would
have stood face to face, eying each other with timid liking,
then giving each other a little butterfly kiss, and toddled off
to play together. Arthur would have gone home to his silk-
curtain cot, and Hetty to her home-spun pillow, and both
would have slept without dreams, and to-morrow would have
been a life hardly conscious of yesterday.

Arthur turned round and walked by Hetty's side without
giving a reason. They were alone together for the first time.
What an overpowering presence that first privacy is ! He
actually dared not look at this little buttermaker for the first
minute or two. As for Hetty, her feet rested on a cloud, and
she was borne along by warm zephyrs \ she had forgotten her
rose-colored ribbons ; she was no more conscious of her limbs
than if her childish soul had passed into a water-lily, resting
on a liquid bed, and warmed by the midsummer sunbeams.

I20 ADAM BEDS.

It may seem a contradiction, but Arthur gatliered a certain
carelessnsss and confidence from his timidity ; it was an en-
tirely different state of mind from what he had expected in
such a meeting with Hetty ; and full as he was of vague feel-
ing, there was room, in those moments of silence, for the
thought that his previous debates and scruples were need-
less.

" You are quite right to choose this way of coming to the
Chase," he said at last, looking down at Hetty ; " it is so
much prettier as well as shorter than coming by either of the
lodges."

" Yes, sir," Hetty answered, with a tremulous, almost
whispering voice. She didn't know one bit how to speak to
a gentleman like Mr. Arthur, and her very vanity made her
more coy of speech.

" Do you come every week to see Mrs. Pomfret .'' "

'' Yes, sir, every Thursday, only Vvhen she's got to go out
with MisS Donnithorne."

" And she's teaching you something, is she .-' "

" Yes, sir, the lace-mending as she learned abroad, and
the stocking-mending — it looks just like the stocking, you
can't tell it's been mended ; and she teaches me cutting-out
too."

" What, ^re you going to be a lady's-maid ? "

" I should like to be one very much indeed." Hetty
spoke more audibly now, but still rather tremulously ; she
thought, perhaps she seemed as stupid to Captain Donni-
thorne as Luke Britton did to her.

" I suppose Mrs. Pomfret always expects you at this
time ? "

"She expects me at four o'clock. I'm rather late to-day,
because my aunt couldn't spare me ; but the regular time is
four, because that gives us time before Miss Donnithorne's
bell rings."

" Ah ! then I must not keep you now, else I should like
to show you the Hermitage. Did vou ever see it ? "

" No, sir."

" This is the walk where we turn up to it. But we must
not go now. I'll show it you some other time if you'd like to
see it."

" Yes, please, sir."

" Do you always come back this way in the evening, or
are you afraid to come so lonelv a road ? "

" Gh r.o, sir, it's never late; I always set out b; fjight

ADAM BEDE. j2t

'^^'clock, and it's so light now in the evening. Mv aunt would
t>e angry with me if I didn't get home before nine."

'' Perhaps Craig, the gardener, comes to take care of
you .? "

A deep blush overspread Hetty's face and neck " I'm
sure he doesn't; I'm sure he never did ; I wouldn't "let him :
I don t like him.' she said hastily, and the tears of vexation
had come so fast that before she had done speaking a bright
crop rolled down her hot cheek. Then she felt ashamed to
death that she was crying, and for one long instant her hap-
piness was all gone. But in the next she felt an arm steal
round her, and a gentle voice said,

" Why, Hetty, what makes you cry } I didn't mean to
vex you. I wouldn't vex you for the world, you little blos-
som Come, don't cry ; look at me, else 1 shall think vou
won t forgive me."

Arthur had laid his hand on the soft arm that was nearest
to him, and was stooping toward Hetty with a look of coax-
mg entreaty. Hetty lifted her long dewy lashes, and met the
eyes that were bent toward her with a sweet, timid beseech-
ing look. _ What a space of time those three moments were
while their eyes met and his arms touched her! Love is such
a simple thing when we have only one-and-twenty summers
and a sweet girl of seventeen trembles under our glance as
if she were a bud l^rst opening her heart with wonderincr rap-
ture to the morning. Such young unfurrowed souls rSll to
meet each other like two velvet peaches that touch softly and
are at rest ; they mingle as easily as two brooklets that ask
for nothing but to entwine themselves and ripple with ever-
interlacing curves in the leafiest hiding-places. While Arthur
gazed into Hetty's dark beseeching eyes, it made no differ-
ence to him what sort of English she spoke ; and even if
hoops and powder had been in fashion, he would very likely
not have been sensible just then that Hetty wanted those
signs of high breeding.

But they started asunder with beating hearts ; something
had fallen on the ground with a rattling noise : it was Hetty's
basket ; all her little workwoman's matters were scattered on
the path, some of them showing a capability of rolling to
great lengths. There was much to be done in picking up,
and not a word was spoken ; but when Arthur hung the
basket over jier arm again, the poor child felt a strange dif-
ference in his look and manner. He just pressed her^hand,
and said, with a look and tone that were almost chilling to her,'

J 22 ADAM BEDS.

" 1 have been hindering you ; I must not keep you any
longer now. You will be expected at the house. Good-by."

Without waiting for her to speak, he turned away from
her, and hurried back toward the road that led to the Her-
mitage, leaving Hetty to pursue her way in a strange dream,
that seemed to have begun in bewildering delight, and was
now passing into contrarieties and sadness. Would he meei
her again as she came home ? Why had he spoken almost
as if he were displeased with her, and then run away so sud-
denly ? She cried, hardly knowing why.

Arthur, too, was very uneasy, but his feelings were lit up
for him by a more distinct consciousness. He hurried to the
Hermitage, which stood in the heart of the wood, unlocked
the door with a hasty wrench, slammed it after him, pitched
Zeliico into the most distant corner, and, thrusting his right
hand into his pocket, first walked four or five times up and
down the scanty length of the little room, and then seated
himself on the ottoman in an uncomfortable, stiff way, as we
often do when we wish not to abandon ourselves to feeling.

He was getting in love with Hetty — that was quite plain.
He was ready to pitch everything else — no matter where —
for the sake of surrendering himself to this delicious feeling
which has just disclosed itself. It was no use blinking the
fact now — they would get too fond of each other if he went
on taking notice of her, and what would come of it ? He
should have to go away in a few weeks, and the poor little thing
would be miserable. Wq must not see her alone again; he
must keep out of her way. What a fool he was for coming
back from Gawaine's !

He got up and threw open the windows to let in the soft
breath of the afternoon and the healthy scent of the firs that
made a belt round the Hermitage. The soft air did not help
his resolutions, as he leaned out and looked into the leafy
distance. But he considered his resolution sufficiently fixed ;
there was no need to debate with himself any longer. He
had made up his mind not to meet Hetty again ; and now he
might give himself up to thinking how immensely agreeable it
would have been to meet her this evening as she came back,
and put his arm round her again and look into her sweet face.
He wondered if the dear little thing were thinking of him too
— twenty t") om she was. How beautiful her eyes were with
the tear on their lashes ! He. would like to satisfy his soul
for a d-^.y with lookmg at them, and he viust see her again ;
he must see her simply to remove any false impression from

ADAM BEDE.

123

her mind about his manner to her just now. He would be-
have in a quiet, kind way to her — just to prevent her from
going home with her head full of wrong fancies. Yes, that
would be the best thing to do, after all.

It was a long while — more than an hour — before Arthur
had brought his meditations to this point ; but once arrived
there, he could stay no longer at the Hermitage. The time
must be filled up with movement until he should see Hetty
again. And it was already late enough to go and dress for
dinner, for his grandfather's dinner-hour was six.

CHAPTER Xni.

EVENING IN THE WOOD.

It happened that Mrs. Pomfret had had a slight quarrel
with Mrs. Best, the housekeeper, on this Thursday morning —
a fact which had two consequences highly convenient to Hetty.
It caused Mrs. Pomfret to have tea sent up to her own room,
and it inspired that exemplary lady's maid with so lively a
recollection of former passages in Mrs. Best's conduct, and of
dialogues in which Mrs. Best had decidedly the inferiority as
an interlocutor with Mrs. Pomfret, that Hetty required no
more presence of mind than was demanded for using her
needle and throwing in an occasional " yes " or " no." She
would have wanted to put on her hat earlier than usual ; only
she had told Captain Donnithorne that she usually set out
about eight o'clock, and if he should go to the Grove again
expecting to see her, and she should be gone ! Would he
come .' Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between
memory and dubious expectation. At last the minute-hand
of the old-fashioned brazen-faced time-piece was on the last
quarter to eight, and there was every reason for its being time
to get ready for departure. Even Mrs. Pomfret's preoccupied
mind did not prevent her from noticing what looked like a
new flush of beauty in the little thing as she tied on her hat
before the looking-glass.

" That child gets prettier and prettier every day. I do be-
lieve." was lier inward comment. "The more's the pity.
She'll get neither a place nor a husband any the sooner for it

124 ADAM BEDE.

Sober well-to-do men don't like such pretty wives. When I
was a girl, I was more admired than if I'd been so very
pretty. However, she's reason to be gratified tome for teach-
ing her something to get her bread with, better than farm-
house work. They always told me I was good-natured — and
that's the truth, and to my hurt too, else there's them in this
house that wouldn't be here now to lord it over me in the
housekeeper's room."

Hetty walked hastily across the short space of pleasure-
ground which she had to traverse, dreading to meet Mr.
Craig, to whom she could hardly have spoken civilly. How
relieved she was when she had got safely under the oaks
and among the fern of the Chase ! Even then she was as
ready to be startled as the deer that leaped away at her ap-
proach. She thought nothing of the evening light that lay
gently in the grassy alleys between the fern, and made the
beauty of their living green more visible than it had been in
the overpowering flood of noon ; she thought of nothing tha'.
was present. She only saw something that was possible : Mr.
Arthur Donnithorne coming to meet her again along the Fir-
tree Grove. That was the foreground of Hetty's picture ; be-
hind it lay a bright hazy something — days that were not to be
as the other days of her life had been. It was as if she had
been wooed by a river-god, who might any time take her to
his wondrous halls below a watery heaven. There was no
knowing what would come since this strange entrancing de-
light had come. If a chest full of lace, and satin, and jewels
had been sent her from some unknown source, how could she
but have thought that her whole lot was going to change, and
that to-morrow some still more bewildering joy would befall
her ? Hetty had never read a novel ; how then could she
find a shape for her expectations ? They were as formless as
the sweet languid odors of the garden at the Chase, which had
floated past her as she walked by the gate.

She is at another gate now — that leading into Fir-tree
Grove. She enters the wood, where it is already twilight, and
at every step she takes the fear at her heart becomes colder.
If he should not come ! Oh, how dreary it was — the thought
of going out at the other end of the wood, into the unshel-
tered road without having seen him. She reaches the first
turning toward the Hermitage, walking slowly — he is not
there. She hates the leveret that runs across the path ; she
hates everything that is not what she longs for. She walks
on, happy whenever she is coming to a bend in the road, for

ADAM BEDE.

ptrhaps he is behind it. No. She is beginning to cry; her
heart has swelled so, the tears stand in her eyes; she gives
one great sob, while the corners of her mouth quiver, and
t.iC tears roll down.

She doesn't know that there is another turning to the Her-
mitage, that she is close against it, and that Arthur Donni-
ihrone is only a few yards from her, full of one thought, and
a thought of which she is the only object. He is going to see
Hetty again — that is the longing which has been growing
through the last three hours to a feverish thirst. Not, of course,
to speak in the caressing way into which he had unguardedly
fallen before dinner, but to set things right with her by a kind-
ness which would have the air of friendly civility, and prevent
her from running away with wrong notions about their mutual
relation.

If Hetty had known he was there, she would not have
cried ; and it would have been better ; for then Arthur would
perhaps have behaved as wisely as he had intended. As it
was, she started when he appeared at the end of the side alley,
and looked up at him with two great drops rolling down her
cheeks. What else could he do but speak to her in a soft,
soothing tone, as if she were a bright-eyed spaniel with a thorn
in her foot ?

'• Has something frightened you, Hetty ? Have you seen
anything in the wood .'' Don't be frightened — I'll take care
of you now."

Hetty was blushing so, she didn't know whether she was
happy or miserable. To be crying again — what did gentlemen
think of girls who cried in that way .'' She felt unable even to
say '• No," but could only look away from him, and wipe the
tears from her cheek. Not before a great drop had fallen on
her rose-colored strings : she knew that quite well.

'* Come, be cheerful again. Smile at me, and tell me what
is the matter. Come, tell me."

Hetty turning her head toward him, whispered, " I thought
you wouldn't come," and slowly got courage to lift her eyes
to him. That look was too much ; he must have had eyes of
Egyptian granite not to look too lovingly in return.

'' You little frightened bird ! little tearful rose ! silly pet !
You won't ciy again, now Tm with you, will you ? "

Ah ! he doesn't know in the least what he is saying. This
is not what he meant to say. His arm is stealing round the
waist again, it is tightening its clasp ; he is bending his face
nearer and nearer to llic round cheek, his lips are meeting those

126 ADAM BEDE.

pouting child-lips, and, for a long moment, time has vanished.
He may be a shepherd in Arcadia for aught he knows, he
may be the first youth kissing the first maiden, he may be
Eros himself, sipping the lips of Psyche — it is all one.

There was no speaking for minutes after. They walked
along with beating hearts till they came within sight of the
gate at the end of the wood. Then they looked at each other,
not quite as they had looked before, for in their eyes, there
was the memory of a kiss.

But already something bitter had begun to mingle itself
with the fountain of sweets ; already Arthur was uncomfort-
able. He took his arm from Hetty's waist, and said,

" Here we are almost at the end of the Grove. I wonder
how late it is," he added, pulling out his watch. " Twenty
minutes past eight — but my watch is too fast. However, I'd
better not go any farther now. Trot along quickly with your
little feet, and get home safely. Good-by."

He took her hand, and looked at her half sadly, half with
a constrained smile. Hetty's eyes seemed to beseech him not
to go away yet ; but he patted her cheek and said " Good-by,"
again. She was obliged to turn away from him and go on.

As for Arthur, he rushed back through the wood as if he
wanted to put a wide space between himself and Hetty. He
would not go to the Hermitage again ; he remembered how
he had debated with himself there before dinner, and it had
all come to nothing — worse than nothing. He walked right
on into the Chase, glad to get out of the Grove, which surely
was haunted by his evil genius. Those beeches and smooth
limes — there was something enervating in the very sight of
them ; but the strong knotted old oaks had no bending languor
in them — the sight of them would give a man some energy.
Arthur lost himself among the narrow openings in the fern,
winding about without seeking any issue, till the twilight
deepened almost to night under the great boughs, and the hare
looked black as it darted across his path.

He was feeling much more strongly than he had done in
the morning ; it was as if his horse had wheeled round from a
leap, and dared to dispute his mastery. He was dissatisfied
with himself, irritated, mortified. He no sooner fixed his
mind on the probable consequences of giving way to the emo-
tions which had stolen over him to-day — of continuing to no-
tice Hetty, of allowing himself any opportunity for such slight
caresses as he had been betrayed into already — than he refused
to believe such a future possible for himself. To flirt with

ADAM BEDE. ,27

Hetty was a very different affair from flirting with a pretty girl
of his own station— that was understood to be an amusement
on both sides : or, if it became serious, there was no obstacle to
marriage. But this little thing would be spoken ill of directly,
if she happened to be seen walking with him , and then those
excellent people, the Poysers, to whom a good name was as
precious as if they had the best blood in the land in their veins
— he should hate himself if he should make a scandal of that
sort, on the estate that was to be his own some day, and
among tenants by whom he liked, above all, to be respected.
He could no more believe that he should so fall in his own
esteem than that he should break both his legs and go on
crutches all the rest of his life. He couldn't imagine himself
in that position — it was too odious, too unlike him.

And, even if no one knew anything about it, they might
get too fond of each other, and then there could be nothing
but the misery of parting, after all N gentleman, out of a
ballad, could marry a farmer's niece There must be an end
to the whole thing at once. It was too foolish.

And yet he had been so determined this morning, before
he went to Gawaine's ; and while he was there something had
taken hold of him and made him gallop back. It seemed he
couldn't quite depend on his own resolution, as he had thought
he could ; he almost wished his arm would get painful again,
and then he should think of nothing but the comfort it would
be to get rid of the pain. There was no knowing what impulse
might seize him to-morrow, in this confounded place, where
there was nothing to occupy him imperiously through the live-
long day. What could he do to secure himself from any more
of this folly ?

There was but one resource. He would go and tell Irwine
— tell him everything. The mere act of telling it would make
it seem trivial ; the temptation would vanish, as the charm of
fond words vanishes when one repeats them to the indifferent.
In every way it would help him, to tell Irwine. He would
ride to Broxton Rectory the first thing after breakfast to-
morrow.

Arthur had no sooner come to this determination than he
began to think which of the paths would lead him home, and
made as short a walk thither as he could. He felt sure he
should sleep now ; he had had enough to tire him, and there
was no more need for him to think.

lag ADAM BEDE,

CHAPTER XIV.

THE RETURN HOME.

While that parting in the wood was happening, there was
a parting in the cottage too, and Lisbeth had stood with Adam
at the door, straining her aged eyes to get the last glimpse of
Seth and Dinah as they mounted the opposite slope.

" Eh ! I'm loath to see the last on her," she said to Adam,
as they turned into the house again. " I'd ha' been willin' t'
ha her about me till I died and went to lie by my old man.
She'd make it easier dyin' — she spakes so gentle an' moves
about so still. I could be fast sure that pictur' was drawed
for her i' thy new Bible — th' angel a-sittin' on the big stone
by the grave. Eh ! I wouldna mind ha'in' a daughter like
that ; but nobody ne'er marries them as is good for aught."

" Well, mother, I hope thee wilt have her for a daugliter ;
for Seth's got a liking for her, and I hope she'll get a liking
for Seth in time."

*' Where's th' use o' talkin' a-that'n ? She caresna for
Seth. She's goin' away twenty mile aff. How's she to get a
likin' for 'm, I'd like to know ? No more nor the cake 'ull
come wi'out th' leaven. Thy figurin' books might ha' tould
thee better nor that, I should think, else thee might'st as well
read the commin print, as Seth allays does."

"Nay, mother," said Adam, laughing, "the figures tell us
a fine deal, and we couldn't go far without 'em, but they don't
tell us about folks's feelings. It's a nicer job to calculate
them. But Seth's as good-hearted a lad as ever handled a
tool, and plenty o' sense, and good-looking too ; and he's got
the same way o' thinking as Dinah. He deserves to win her,
though there's no denying she's a rare bit o' workmanship.
You don't see such women turned off the wheel every day."

" Eh ! thee't allays stick up for thy brother. Thee'stbeen
just the same, e'er sin' ye war little uns together. Thee wart
allays for halving ivery thing wi 'm. But what's Seth got to
do with marr'in', as is on'y three-an '-twenty .'' He'd more need
t' learn an' lay by sixpence An' as for his deservin' her —
she's two 'ear older nor Seth ; she's pretty near as old as thee.
But that's the way : folks mun allays choose by contrairies, as

ADAM BBDE. ,2g

if they must be sorted like the pork — a bit o' good meat wi' a
bit o' offal."

To the feminine mind, in some of its moods, all things that
might be, receive a temporary charm from comparison with
what is ; and since Adam did not want to marry Dinah him-
self, Lisbeth felt rather peevish on that score — as peevish as
she would have been if he had wanted to marry her, and so
shut himself out from Mary Burge and the partnership ar
effectually as by marrying Hetty.

It was more than half past eight when Adam and his
mother were talking in this way, so that when, about ten
minutes later, Hetty reached the turning of the lane that led
to the farm-yard gate, she saw Dinah and Seth approaching
it from the opposite direction, and waited for them to come
up to her. They, too, like Hetty, had lingered a little in
their walk, for Dinah was trying to speak words of comfort
and strength to Seth in these parting moments. But when
they saw Hetty, they paused and shook hands : Seth turned
homeward, and Dinah came on alone.

" Seth Bede would have come and spoken to you, my
dear," she said, as she reached Hetty, " but he's very full of
trouble to night."

Hetty answered with a dimpled smile, as if she did not
quite know what had been said ; and it made a strange con-
trast to see^Hhat sparkling, self-engrossed loveliness looked
at by Dmah's calm, pitying face, with its open glance which
told that her heart lived in no cherished secrets of its own,
but in feelings which it longed to share with all the world.
Hetty liked Dinah as well as she hadever Hked any woman ;
how_ was It possible to feel otherwise toward one who always
put in a kind word for her when her aunt was finding fault,
and who was always ready to take Totty ofif her hands— little,
tiresome Totty, that was made such a pet of by every one[
and that Hetty could see no interest in at all .? ' Dinah had
never said anything disapproving or reproachful to Hetty
during her whole visit to the Hall Farm ; she had talked to
her a great deal in a serious way, but Hetty didn't mind that
much, for she never listened ; whatever Dinah might say, she
almost always stroked Hetty's cheek after it, and wanted to
do some mending for her. Dinah was a riddle to her ; Hetty
looked at her much in the same way as one might imagine a
little perching bird, that could only flutter from bough to
bough, to look at the swoop of the swallow or the mounting
of khe lark ; but she did not care to solve such riddles, any

130

ADAM BEDE.

more than she cared to know what was meant by the pictures
in the " Pilj^rim's Progress," r in the old folio Bible that
Marty and Tommy always plagued her about on Sunday,

Dinah took her hand now and drew it under her own arm.

" You look very happy to-night, dear child," she said. " I
shall think of you often when I'm at Snowfield, and see your
face before me as it is now. It's a strange thing — sometimes
when I'm quite alone, sitting in my room with my eyes
closed, or walking over the hills, the people I've seen and
known, if it's only been for a few days, are brought before
me, and I hear their voices and see them look and move,
almost plainer than I ever did when they were really with me
so as I could touch them. And then my heart is drawn out
toward them, and I feel their lot as if it was my own, and I
take comfort in spreading it before the Lord and resting in
his love, on their behalf as well as my own. And so I feel
sure you will come before me."

She paused a moment, but Hetty said nothing.

" It has been a very precious time to me," Dinah went
on, "last night and today — seeing two such good sons as
Adam and Seth Bede. They are so tender and thoughtful
for their aged mother. And she has been telling me what
Adam has done, for these many years, to help his father and
his brother : it's wonderful what a spirit of wisdom and
knowledge he has, and how he's ready to use it all in be-
half of them that are feeble. And I'm sure he has a loving
spirit too. I've noticed it often among my own people round
Snowfield, that the strong, skilful men are often the gentlest
\o the women and children ; and it's pretty to see 'em carry-
ing the little babies as if they were no heavier than little
birds. And the babies always seem to like the strong arm
best. I feel sure it would be so with Adam Bede. Don't
you think so, Hetty ? "

"Yes," said Hetty, abstractedly, for her mind had been
all the while in the wood, and she would have found it diffi-
cult to say what she was assenting to. Dinah saw she was
not inclined to talk, but there would not have been time to
say much more, for they were now at the yard-gate.

The still twilight, with its dying western red, and its few
faint struggling stars, rested on the farm-yard, where there
was not a sound to be heard but the stamping of the cart-
horses in the stable. It was about twenty minutes after. sun-
set ; the fowls were all gone to roost, and the bull-dog lay
Stretched on the straw outside his kennel, with the black-and'

ADAM BEDE.

i3»

tan terrier by his side, when the falling-to of the gate dis-
turbed them, and set them barking, like good officials, before
they had any distinci; knowledge of the reason.

The barking had its effect in the house ; for, as Dinah
and Hetty approached, the doorway was filled by a portly
figure, with a ruddy, black-eyed face, which bore in it the
possibility of looking extremely acute, and occasionally con-
temptuous, on market-days, but had now a predominant
after-supper expression of hearty good-nature. It is well
known that great scholars who have shown the most pitiless
acerbity in their criticism of other men's scholarship have
yet been of a relenting and indulgent temper in private life ;
and I have heard of a learned man meekly rocking the twins
in the cradle with his left hand, while with his right he in-
flicted the most lacerating sarcasms on an opponent who had
betrayed a brutal ignorance of Hebrew. Weaknesses and
errors must be forgiven — alas ! they are not alien to us — but
the man who takes the wrong side on the momentous sub-
ject of the Hebrew points must be treated as the enemy of
his race. There was the same sort of antithetic mixture in
Martin Poyser ; he was of so excellent a disposition that he
had been kinder and more respectful than ever to his old
father since he had made a deed of gift of all his property,
and no man judged his neighbors more charitably on all per-
sonal matters ; but for a farmer, like Luke Britton, for exam-
ple, whose fallows were not well cleaned, who didn't know
the rudiments of hedging and ditching, and showed but a
small share of judgmenr in the purchase of winter stock,
Martin Poyser was as hard and implacable as the north-east
wind. Luke Britton could not make a remark, even on the
weather, but Martin Poyser detected in it a taint of that un-
soundness and general ignorance which was palpable in all
his farming operations. He hated to see the fellow lift the
pewter pint to his mouth in the bar of the Royal George on
market-day, and the mere sight of him on the other side of
the road brought a severe and critical expression mto his
black eyes, as different as possible from the fatherly glance
he bent on his two nieces as they approached the door. Mr.
Poyser had smoked his evening pipe, and now held his hands
in his pockets, as the only resource of a man who continues
to sit up after the day's business is done.

" Why, lasses, ye're rather late to-night," he said, when
they reached the little gate leading into the causeway. " The
mother's begun lo fidget about you, an' she's got the little un

132

ADAM BEDE.

ill. An' how did you leave th' old woman Bede, Dinah ? Is
she much down about th' old man ? He'd been but a poor
bargain to her this five year."

" She's been greatly distressed for the loss of him," said
Dinah, " but she's seemed more comforted to day. Her son
Adam's been at home all day, working at his father's coffin,
and she loves to have him at home. She's been talking
about him to me almost all the day. She has a loving heart,
though she's sorely given to fret and be fearful. I wish she
had a surer trust to comfort her in her old age."

" Adam's sure enough," said Mr. Poyser, misunderstand
ing Dinah's wish. " There's no fear but he'll yield well i'
the threshing. He's not one o' them as is all straw and no
grain. I'll be bond for him any day, as he'll be a good son
to the last. Did he say he'd be coming to see us, soon.'' But
come in, come in," he added, making way for them ; " I
hadn't need keep y' out any longer."

The tall buildings round the yard shut out a good deal of
the sky, but the large window let in abundant light to show
every corner of the house-place.

Mrs. Poyser, seated in the rocking-chair, which had been
brought out of the " right-hand parlor," was trying to soothe
Totty to sleep. But Totty was not disposed to sleep ; and
when her cousins entered, she raised herself up, and showed
a pair of flushed cheeks, which looked fatter than ever now
they were defined by the edge of her linen night-cap.

In the large wicker-bottomed arm-chair in the left-hand
chimney-nook sat old Martin Poyser, a hale but shrunken
and bleached image of his portly black-haired son — his head
hanging forward a little, and his elbows pushed backward so
as to allow the whole of his fore-arm to rest on the arm of
the chair. His blue handkerchief was spread over his knees,
as was usual in-doors, when it was not hanging over his head ;
and he sat watching what went forward with the quiet out-
ward glance of healthy old age, which, disengaged from any
interest in an inward drama, spies out pins upon the floor,
follows one's minutest motions with an unexpectant purpose-
less tenacit)', watches the flickering of the flame or the sun-
gleams on the wall, counts the quarries on the floor, watches
even the hand of the clock, and pleases itself with detecting
a rhythm in the tick.

" What a time o' night this is to come home, Hetty," said
Mr$. Poyser. " Look at the clock, do ; why, it's going on
for half-past nine, an' I've sent the gells to bed this half

ADA.)/ BEDE. i^,

hour, and late enough too, when they've got to get up at
half after four, and the mowers' bottles to fill, and the bak-
ing ; and here's this blessed child wi' the fever for what I
know, and as wakeful as if it was dinner-time, and nobody to
help me give her the physic but your uncle, and fine work
there's been, and half of it spilt on her night-gown — it's well
if she's swallowed more nor'uU make her worse i'stead o'
better. But folks as have no mind to be o' use, have allays
the luck to be out o' the road when there's anvthing to be
done."

"I did set out before eight, aunt," said Hetty, in a pettish
tone, with a slight toss of her head. " But this olock s so
much before the clock at the Chase, there's no telling what
time it'll be when I get here. '

" What, you'd be wanting the clock set by gentlefolks'
time, would you ? an' sit up burnin' candle, an' lie abed wi'
the sun a-bakin' you, like a cowcumber i' the frame ? The
clock hasn't been put forrard for the first time to-day, I
reckon."

The fact was, Hetty had really forgotten the difference of
the clocks when she told Captain Donnithorne that she set
out at eight, and this, with her lingering pace, had made her
nearly half an hour later than usual. But here her aunt's at-
tention was diverted from the tender subject by Tottv, who,
perceiving at length that the arrival of her cousins was not
likely to bring anything satisfactory to her in particular, began
to cry, " Munny, munny," in an explosive manner.

"Well, then, my pet, mother's got her, mother won't leave
her; Totty be a good dilling. and go to sleep now," said Mrs.
Poyser, leaning back and rocking the chair, while she tried to
make Totty nestle against her. But Totty only cried louder
and said, " don't yock ! " So the mother, with that wondrous
patience which love gives to the quickest temperament, sat up
again, and pressed her cheek against the linen night-cap and
kissed it -and forgot to scold Hetty any longer.

" Come, Hetty," said Martin Poyser, in a conciliatory
tone, go and get your supper 'i the pantry, as the things are all
put away ; an' then you can come an' takti the little un
while your aunt undresses herself, for she won't lie down in
bed without her mother. An' I reckon you could eat a bit,
Dinah, for they don't keep much of a house down there."

" No, thank you, uncle," said Dinah ; " I ice a good meal
before I came away, for Mrs. Bede would make a kettle-cake
*or me. '

134 ADAM BEDE.

" I don't want any supper," said Hetty, taking off her hat
" I can hold Totty now, if aunt wants me."

" Why, what nonsense that is to talk," said Mrs. Poyser.
" Do you think you can Uve wi'out eatin', an' nourish your in-
side wi' stickin' red ribbins on your head ? Go an' get your
supper this minute, child ; there's a nice bit o' cold pudding
i' the safe — just what you're fond on."

Hetty complied silently by going toward the pantry, and
Mrs. Poyser went on, speaking to Dinah.

" Sit down^ my dear, an' look as if you knowed what it
was to make yourself a bit comfortable i' the world. I war-
rant the old woman was glad to see you, since you staid so
long ? "

" She seemed to like having me there at last ; but her
sons say she doesn't like young women about her, commonly;
and I thought just at first she was almost angry with me for
going."

" Eh ! it's a poor look-out when th' ould foulks doesna like
the young 'uns," said old Martin, bending his head dowa
lower, and seeming to trace the pattern of the quarries with
his eye.

*' Ay, it's ill livin' in a hen-roost for them as doesn't like
fieas," said Mrs. Poyser. " We've all had our turn at bein'
young, I reckon, be't good luck or ill."

" But she must learn to 'commodate herself to young
women," said Mr. Poyser, " for it isn't to be counted on as
Adam and Seth 'ull keep bachelors for the next ten year to
please their mother. That 'ud be onreasonable. It isn't
right for old nor young naythur to make a bargain all their
own side. What's good for one's good all round, i' the long
run. I'm no friend to young fellows a-marr'ing afore the\-
know the difference atween a crab an' a apple ; but they may
wait o'er long."

"To be sure," said Mrs. Poyser; "if you go past your
dinner-time there'll be little relish o' your meat. -You turn
it o'er an' o'er wi' your fork, an' don't eat it after all. You'
Ijind fau't wi' your meat, an' the fau't's all i' your own stomach."

Hetty now came back from the pantry, and said, " I can
take Totty now, aunt, if you like.'

" Come, Rachel," said Mr. Poyser, as his wife seemed to
hesitate, seeing that Totty was at last nestling quietly,
" thee'dst better let Hetty carry her up stairs, while thee
tak'st thy things off. Thee't tired. It's time thee wast in bed.
Thee't bring on the pain in thy side again."

ADAM BEDE. j,-

" Well, she may hold her if the child '11 go to her," said
Mrs. Poyser.

Hetty went close to the rocking-chair and stood without
her usual smile, and without any attempt to entice Totty,
simply waiting for her aunt to give the child into her hands'.

"Wilt go to Cousin Hetty, my dilling, while mother gets
ready to go to bed ? Then Totty shall go into mother's bed
and sleep there all night."

Before her mother had done speaking, Totty had given
her answer in an unmistakable manner, by knitting her brow,
setting her tiny teeth against her under lip, and leaning for-
ward to slap Hetty on the arm with her utmost force. Then,
without speaking, she nestled to her mother agaio.

" Hey ! hey ! " said Mr. Poyser, while Hetty stood without
moving, "not go to Cousin Hetty.? That's like a babby;
Totty's a little woman, an' not a babb)^"

" It's no use trjdn' to persuade her," said Mr. Poyser.
"She allays takes against Hetty when she isn't well. Happen
she'll go to Dinah."

Dinah, having taken off her bonnet and shawl, had hith-
erto kept quietly seated in the background, not liking to thrust
herself between Hetty and what was considered Hetty's proper
work. But now she came forward, and, putting out her arms,
said, " Come, Tottj', come and let Dinah carry her up stairs
along with mother ; poor, poor mother ! she's so tired — she
wants to go to bed."

Totty turned her face toward Dinah, and looked at her all
instant, then lifted herself up, put out her little arms, and let
Dinah lift her from her mother's lap. Hetty turned away
tvithout any sign of ill-humor, and, taking her hat from the
table, stood waiting with an air of indifference, to see if she
should be told to do anything else.

" You may make the door fast now, Poyser ; Alick's been
come in this long while," said Mrs. Poyser, rising with an ap-
pearance of relief from her low chair. " Get me the matches
down, Hetty, for I must have the rushlight burning i' my
room. Come, father."

The heavy wooden bolts began to roll in the house doors,
and old Martiii prepared to move, by gathering up his blue
handkerchief, and reaching his bright knobbed walnut-tree
stick from the corner. Mrs. Poyser then led the way out of
the kitchen, followed by the grandfather, and Dinah with
Totty in her arms — all going to bed by twilight, like the
birds, Mrs. Poyser, on her way, peeped into the room

/36 ADAM BEDR.

where her two boys lay, just to see t'.ieir luddy round cheeks
6n the pillow, and to hear for a moment their light, regular
breathing.

" Come, Hetty, get to bed," said Mr. Poyser, in a sooth-
ing tone, as he himself turned to go up stairs, " You didna
mean to be late, I'll be bound ; but your aunt's been worrited
to-day. Good-night, my wench, good-night."

CHAPTER XV.

THE TWO BED-CHAMBERS.

Hetty and Dinah both slept in the second story, in rooms
adjoining each other, meagrely-furnished rooms, with ao
blinds to shut out the light, which was now beginning to
gather new strength from the rising of the moon — more than
mough strength to enable Hetty to move about and undress
fv'ith perfect comfort. She could see quite well the pegs in
(he old painted linen-press on which she hung her hat and
gown ; she could see the head of every pin on her red cloth
pin-cushion ; she could see a reflection of herself in tb.e old-
fashioned looking-glass, quite as distinct as was needful, con-
sidering that she had only to brush her hair and put on her
night cap. A queer old looking-glass ! Hetty got into an ili-
temper with it almost every time she dressed. It had been
considered a handsome glass in its day, and had probably
been bought into the Poyser family a quarter of a century
before, at a sale of genteel household furniture. Even now an
auctioneer could say something for it ; it had a firm mahogany
base, well supplied with drawers, which opened with a
decided jerk, and sent the contents leaping out from ihe
farthest corners, without giving you the trouble of reaching
them ; above all, it had a brass candle-socket on each side,
which would give it an aristocratic air to the very last. Pkit
Hetty objected to it because it had numerous dim bloiches
sprinkled over the mirror, which no rubbing would remove,
and because, instead of swinging backward and forward, it
was fixed in an upright position, so that she could only get
one good view of her head and neck, and that was to be nad

ADAM BEDE.

^vCi-^ by sitting down on a low chair before her dressing-table
And the dressing-table was no dressing-table at all, but a
small old chest of drawers, the most awkward thing "n the
world to sit down before, for the big brass handles quite hurt
her knees, and she couldn't get near the glass at all comfort-
ably. But devout worshippers never allow inconveniences to
prevent them from performing their religious rites, and Hetty
this evening was more bent on her peculiar form of worship
than usual.

Having taken off her gown and white 'kerchief, she drew
a key from the large pocket that hung outside her petticoat,
and unlocking one of the lower drawers in the chest, readied
from it two short- bits of wax candle — secretly bought at
Treddleston — and stuck them in the two brass sockets. Then
ihe drew forth a bundle of matches, and lighted the candles ;
and last of all, a small red-framed shilling looking-glass, with-
out blotches. It was into this small glass that she chose to
look first after seating herself. She looked into it, smiling,
and turning her head on one side, for a minute, then laid it
down and took out her brush and comb from an upper
drawer. She was going to let down her hair, and make her-
self look like that picture of a lady in Miss Lydia Donni-
thorne's dressing-room. It was soon done, and the dark hya-
cinthine curves fell on her neck. It was not heavy, massive,
merely rippling hair, but soft and silken, running at every op-
portunity into delicate rings. But she pushed it all backward,
to look like the picture, and form a dark curtain, throwing
into relief her round white neck. Then she put down her
brush and comb, and looked at herself, folding her arms
before her, still like the picture. Even the old mottled glass
couldn't help sending back a lovely image, none the less lovely
because Hetty's stays were not of white satin — such as I feel
sure heroines must generally wear — but of a dark greenish
cot'ton texture.

Oh yes ! she was very pretty ; Captain Donnithorne
thought so. Prettier than any body about Hayslope — pret-
tier than any of the ladies she had ever seen visiting at the
Chase — indeed it seemed fine ladies were rather old and ugly
— and prettier than Miss Bacon, the miller'^; daughter, who
was called the beauty of Treddleston. And Hetty looked at
herself to-night with quite a different sensation from what
she had ever felt before ; there was an invisible spectator
whose eye rested on her like morning on the flowers. His
&oft voice was saying over and over again those pretty tilings

138 ADAM BEDE.

she had heard in the wood ; his arm was round her, and the
delicate rose-scent of his hair was with her still. The vainest
woman is never thoroughly conscious of her own beauty till
she is loved by the man who sets her own passion vibrating
In return.

But Hetty seemed to have made up her mind that some-
thing was wanting, for she got up and reached an old black
lace scarf out of the linen-press, and a pair of large earrings
out of the sacred drawer from which she had taken her can-
dles. It was an old, old scarf, full of rents, but it would
make a becoming border round her shoulders, and set off the
whiteness of her upper arm. And she would take out the
little earrings she had in her ears — oh, how her aunt had
scolded her for having her ears bored ! and put in those large
ones ; they were but colored glass and gilding ; but, if you
didn't know what they were made of, they looked just as well
as what the ladies wore. And so she sat down again, with
the large earrings in her ears, and the black lace scarf ad-
justed round her shoulders. She looked down at her arms ;
no arms could be prettier down to a little way below the el-
bow— they w^ere white and plump, and dimpled to match her
cheeks ; but towards the wrist she thought with vexation that
they were coarsened by butter-making, and other work that
ladies never did.

Captain Donnithorne couldn't like her to go on doing
work ; he would like to see her in nice clothes, and thin shoes
and white stockings, perhaps with silk clocks to them ; for
he must love her very much — no one else had ever put his
arm around her and kissed her in that way. He would want
to marry her, and make a lady of her — she could hardly dare
to shape the thought — yet how else could it be } Marry her
quite secretly, as Mr. James, the doctor's assistant, married
the doctor's niece, and nobody ever found it out for a long
while after, and then it was of no use to be angry. The doc-
tor had told her aunt all about it in Hetty's hearing. She
didn't know how it would be, but it was quite plain the old
squire could never be told anything about it, for Hetty was
ready to faint with awe and fright if she came across him at
the Chase. He might have been earth-born, for what she
knew \ it had never entered her mind that he had been young
like other men — he had always been the old squire at whom
everybody was frightened. Oh, it was impossible to think
how it would be ! But Captain Donnithorne would know ;
he was a great gentleman, and could have his way in every-

ADAM BEDE. j-q

thing, and could buy everything he liked. And nothing
could be as it had been again ; perhaps some day she should
be a grand lady and ride in her coach, and dress for dinner
in a brocaded silk, with feathers in her hair and her dress
sweeping the ground, like Miss Lydia and Lady Dacey, when
she saw them going into the dining-room one evening,' as she
peeped through' the little round window in the lobby ; only
she should not be old and ugly like Miss Lydia, or all the
same the thickness like Lady Dacey, but very pretty, with her
hair done in a great many different' ways, and sometimes in a
pink dress, and sometimes in a white one — she didn't know
which she liked best ; and Mary Burge and everybody would
perhaps see her going out in her carriage — or rather, they
would hear of it ; it was impossible to imagine these things
happening at Hayslope in sight of her aunt. At the thought
of all this splendor, Hetty got up from her chair, and in doing
so caught the little red-framed glass with the edge of her
scarf, so that it fell with a bang on the floor ; but she was too
eagerly occupied with her vision to care about picking it up ;
and after a momentary start, began to pace with a pigeon-like
stateliness backward and forward along her room, in her col-
ored stays and colored skirt, and the old black' lace scarf
round her shoulders, and the great glass earrings in her ears.
How pretty the little puss looks in that odd dress ! It
would be the easiest folly in the world to fall in love with
her ; there is such a sweet, babylike roundness about her face
and figure ; the delicate dark rings of hair lie so charmindy
about her ears and neck ; her great dark eyes, with their lo'ii'^
eyelashes, touch one so strangely, as if an imprisoned, frisky
sprite looked out of them.

Ah ! what a prize a man gets who wins a sweet bride like
Hetty. How the men envy him who come to the weddino-
breakfast and see her hanging on his arm in her white lace
and orange blossoms. The dear, young, round, soft, flexible
thing ! Her heart must be just as soft, her temper just as
free from angles, her character just as pliant. If anythin'^
ever goes wrong, it must be the husband's fault there ; he can
niake her what he likes, that is plain. And the lover himself
thinks so too ; the little darling is so fond of him, her little
vanities are so bewitching, he wouldn't consent to her being
a bit wiser ; those kitten-like glances and movements are jusi
what one wants to make one's hearth a paradise. Every man
under such circumstances is conscious of being a great" phys-
iognomist. Nature, he knows, has a language of her own,

t4o

ADAM BEDE.

which she uses with strict veracity, and he considers himself
an adept in the language. Nature has written out his bride's
character for him in those exquisite lines of cheek and lip
and chin, in those eyelids delicate as petals, in those long
lashes curled like the stamen of a flower, in the dark, liquid
depths of those wonderful eyes. How she will dote on her
children ! She is almost a child herself, and the little, pink,
round things will hang about her like florets round the central
flower ; and the husband will look on, smiling benignly, able
whenever he chooses to withdraw into the sanctuary of his
wisdom, toward which his sweet wife will look reverently, and
never lift the curtain. It is a marriage such as they made in
the golden age, when the men were all wise and majestic, and
the women all lovely and loving.

It was very much in this way that our friend Adam Bede
thought about Hetty ; only he put his thoughts into very dif-
ferent words. If ever she behaved with cold vanity toward
him, he said to himself, it is only because she doesn't love me
well enough ; and he was sure that her love, whenever she
gave it, would be the most precious thing a man could possess
on earth. Before you despise Adam as deficient in penetra-
tion, pray ask yourself if you were ever predisposed to believe
evil of any pretty woman — if you ever could, without hard
head-breaking demonstration, believe evil of \\iQone supremely
pretty woman who has bewitched you. No ; people who love
downy peaches are apt not to think of the stone, and some-
times jar their teeth terribly against it.

Arthur Donnithorne, too, had the same sort of notion about
Rett}-, so far as he had thought of her nature at all. He felt
sure she was a dear, affectionate, good little thing. The man
who awakes the wondering, tremulous passion of a young girl
always thinks her affectionate ; and if he chances to look for-
ward to future years, probably imagines himself being virtu-
ously tender to her, because the poor thing is so clingingly
fond of him. God made these dear women so — and it is a
convenient arrangement in case of sickness.

After all, I believe tlie wisest of us must be beguiled in
tills way sometimes, and must think both better and worse of
people than they deserve. Nature has her language, and she
is not unveracious ; but we don't know all the intricacies of
her syntax just yet, and in a hasty reading we may happen to
extract the very opposite cf her real meaning. Long dark
eyelashes now ; what can be more exquisite ? I find it im-
possible not to expect some depth of soul behind a deep gray

ADAM BEDE.

141

eye with a long dark e}'elash, in spite of an experience whicli
lias shown ine that they go along with deceit, peculation, and
stupidity. But if, in the reaction of disgust, i have, betaken
myself to a fishy eye, there has been a surprising similarity of
result. One begins to suspect at length that there is no direct
correlation between eyelasnes and morals, or else that the
eyelashes express the disposition of the fair one's grandmother,
which is, on the whole, less important to us.

No eyelashes could be more beautiful then Hetty's ; and
now, while she walks with her pigeon-like stateliness along
the room, and looks down on her shoulders bordered by the
old black lace, the dark fringe shows to perfection on her
pink cheek. They are but dim, ill-defined pictures that her
narrow bit of an imagination can make of the future \ but of
every picture she is the central figure, in fine clothes. Cap-
tain Donnithorne is very close to her, putting his arm round
her, perhaps kissing her, and everybody else is admiring and
envying her, especially Mary Burge, whose new print dress
looks very contemptible by the side of Hetty's resplendent
toilet. Does any sweet or sad memory mingle with this dream
of the future — any loving thought of her second parents — of
the children she had helped to tend — of any youthful com-
panion, any pet animal, any relic of her own childhood even 1
Not one. There are some plants that have hardly any roots ;
you may tear them from their native nook of rock of wall, and
just lay them over your ornamental flour-pot, and they blos-
som none the worse. Hetty could have cast all her past life
behind her, and never cared to be reminded of it again. I
think she had no feeling at all toward the old house, and did
not like the Jacob's Ladder and the long row of hollyhocks in
the garden better than other flowers — perhaps not so well. It
was wonderful how little she seemed to care about waiting on
her uncle, who had been a good father to her ; she haVdly
ever remembered to reach him his pipe at the right time with-
out being told, unless a visitor happened to be there, who
would have a better opportunity of seeing her as she walked
across the hearth. Hetty did not understand how anybody
could be very fond of middle-aged people. And as for those
tiresome children, Marty, and Tommy, and Tolty, they had
been the very nuisance of her life — as bad as buzzing insects
that will come teasing you on a hot day when you want to be
quiet. Marty, the eldest, was a baby when she first came to
the farm, for the children born before him had died, and so
Hetty had had them all three, one after the otlier, toddlir.g

141 ADAM BEDE.

by her side in the meadow, or playing about her on wet days
in the half-empty rooms of the large old house. The boys
were out of hand now, but Totty was still a day-long plague,
worse than either of the others had been, because there was
more fuss made about her. And there was no end to the mak-
ing and mending of clothes. Hetty would have been glad to
hear that she should never see a child again ; they were worse
than the nasty Utile lambs that the shepherd was always bring-
ing in to cie lake special care of in lambing time, for the
lambs were got rid of sooner or later. As for the young
chickens and turkeys, Hetty would have hated the very word
" hatching " if her aunt had not bribed her to attend to the
young poultry by promising her the proceeds of one out of
every brood. The round downy chicks peeping out from
under their mother's wing never touched Hetty with any pleas-
ure ; that was not the sort of prettiness she cared about ; but
she did care about the prettiness of the new things she would
buy for herself at Treddleston fair with the money they fetched.
And yet she looked so dimpled, so charming, as she stooped
down to put the soaked bread under the hen-coop, that you
must have been a very acute personage indeed to suspect her
of that hardness. Molly, the housemaid, with a turn-up nose
and a protuberant jaw, was really a tender-hearted girl, and,
as Mrs. Poyser said, a jewel to look after the poultry ; but
her stolid face showed nothing of this maternal delight any
more than a brown earthenware pitcher will show the light
of the lamp within it.

It is generally a feminine eye that first detects the moral
deficiencies hidden under the " dear deceit " of beauty ; so it
is not surprising that Mrs. Poyser, with her keenness and
abundant opportunity for observation, should have formed a
tolerably fair estimate of what might be expected from Hetty
in the way of feeling, and in moments of indignation she had
sometimes spoken with great openness on the subject to her
husband.

*' She's no better than a peacock, as 'ud strut about on
the wall and spread its tail when the sun shone if all the folks
i' the parish was dying ; there's nothing seems to give her a
turn i' th' inside, not even when we thought Totty had tum-
bled into the pit. To think o' that dear cherub ! And we
found her wi' her little shoes stuck i' the mud an' crying fit to
break her heart by the far horse-pit. Hetty niver minded it,
I could see, though she's been at the nussin' o' the child iver

ADAM BEDE. 143

since it was a babby. It's my belief her heart's as hard as a
pibble."

" Nav, nay," said Mr. Poyser, " thee mustn't judge Hetty
too hard". Them young gells are like th' unripe grain— they'll
make good meal by and by, but they're squashy as yit. Thee't
see, Hetty'll be all right when she's got a good husband an'
children of her own."

"/don't want to be hard upo' the gell. She's got diver
fingers of her own, and can be useful enough when she likes,
and I should miss her wi" the butter, for she's got a cool
hand. An' let be what may, I'd strive to do my part by a
niece o' yours, an' that I've done ; for I've taught her every-
thing as belongs to a house, an' I've told her her duty ofcen
enough, though, God knows, I've no breath to spare, an' that
catchin' pain comes on dreadful by times. Wi' them three
gells in the house, I'd need have twice the strength to keep
'em up to their work. It's like having roast meat at three
fires ; as soon as you've basted one, another's burnin'. "

Hetty stood sufficiently in awe of her aunt to be anxious
to conceal from her so much of her vanity as could be hidden
without too great a sacrifice. She could not resist spending
her money in bits of finery which Mrs. Poyser disapproved ;
but she would have been ready to die with shame, vexation,
and fright, if her aunt had this moment opened the door, and
seen her with her bits of candle lighted, and strutting about
decked in her scarf and earrings. To prevent such a sur-
prise, she always bolted her door, and she had not forgotten
to do so to-night. It was well ; for there now came a light
tap, and Hetty, with a leaping heart, rushed to blow out the
candles and throw them into the drawer. She dare not stay
to take out her earrings, but she threw off her scarf and let it
fall on the floor before the light tap came again. We shall
know how it was that the light tap came if we leave Hetty for
a short time and return to Dinah at the moment when she
had delivered Totty to her mother's arms, and was come up
stairs to her bed-room, adjoining Hetty's.

Dinah delighted in her bed-room window. Being on the
second story of that tall house, it gave her a wide view over
the fields. The thickness of the wall formed a broad step
about a yard below the window, where she could place her
chair. And now the first thing she did on entering her room
was to seat herself in this chair, and look out on the peaceful
fields, l)eyond which the large moon was rising just above the
hedgerow elms. She liked the pasture best, where the milch

ii4

ADAAf BEDE.

COWS were lying, and next to that the meadow where the grass
was half mown, and lay in silvered sweeping lines. Her
heart' was very full, for there was to be only one more night
on which she would look out on those fields for a long time to
come ; but she thought little of leaving the mere scene, for to
her bleak Snowfield had just as many charms ; she thought
of all the dear people whom she had learned to care for
among these peaceful fields, and wlio would now have a
place in lier loving remembrance forever. She thought of
the struggles and the weariness that might lie before them in
the rest of their life's journey, when she should be away from
them and know nothing of what was befalling them ; and the
pressure of this thought soon became too strong for her to
enjoy the unresponding stillness of the moonlit fields. She
closed her eyes, that she might feel more intensely the pres-
ence of a love and sympathy deeper and more tender than
was breathed from the earth and sky. That was often
Dinah's mode of praying in solitude. Simply to close her
eyes and to feel herself inclosed by the Divine Presence ;
then gradually her fears, her yearning anxieties for others,
melted away like ice-crystals in a warm ocean. She had sat
in this way perfectly still, with her hands crossed on her lap,
and the pale light resting on her calm face, for at least ten
minutes, when she was startled by a loud sound, apparently
of something falling in Hetty's room ; but, like all sounds
that fall on our ears in a state of abstraction, it had no dis-
tinct character, but was simply loud and startling, so that she
felt uncertain whether she had interpreted it rightly. She
rose and listened, but all was quiet afterward, and she re-
flected that Hetty might merely have knocked something
down in getting into bed. She began slowly to undress ; but
now, owing to the suggestions of this sound, her thoughts
became concentrated on Hetty : that sweet young tiling, with
life and all its trials before her — the solemn daily duties of
the wife and mother — and her mind so unprepared for them
all ; bent merely on little, foolish, selfish pleasures, like a child
hugging its toys in the beginning of a long, toilsome journey,
in which it will nave to bear hunger, and cold, and un-
sheltered darkness. Dinah felt a double care for Hetty, be-
cause she shared Serb's anxious interest in his brother's lot,
and she had not come to the conclusiori that Hetty did not
love Adam well enough to marry him. She saw too clearly
the absence of any waiiii, self-devoting love in Hetty's nature
to icgard the coldiicss of her behavior toward Adam as any

ADAM BEDE. I^e

indication that he was not the man she would h'ke to have
for a husband. And this blank in Hetty's nature, instead of
exciting Dinah's dislike, only touched her with a deeper pity ;
the lovely face and form affected her as beauty ahvavs atfects
a pure and tender mind free from selfish jealousies : it was
an excellent divine gift, that gave a deeper pathos to the
need, the sin, the sorrow with which it was mingled, as the
canker in a lily-white bud is more grievous to behold than in
a common pot-herb.

By the time Dinah had undressed and put on her night-
gown, this feeling about Hetty had gathered a painful inten-
sity; her imagination had created a thorny thicket of sin ard
sorrow, in which she saw the poor thing struggling, torn and
bleeding, looking with tears for rescue and finding none. It
was in this way that Dinah's imagination and sympathy acted
and reacted habitually, each heightening the other. She felt
a deep longing to go now and pour into Hetty's ear all the
words of tender warning and appeal that rushed into her
mind. But perhaps Hetty was already asleep. Dinah put
her ear to the partition, and heard stiil some slight noises
which convinced her that Hetty was not 3et in bed. Still
slie hesitated ; she was not quite certain of a di\ ine direction ;
the voice that told her to go to Hetty seemed no stronger than
the other voice which said that Hetty was weary, and that
going to her now in an unseasonable moment would only tend
to close her heart more obstinately. Dinah was not satisfied
without a more unmistakable guidance then those inward
voices. There was light enough, if she opened her Bible, for
her to discern the text sufficiently to know what it would say
to her. She knew the physiognomy of e\ ery page, and could
tell on what book she opened, sometimes on what chapter,
without seeing title or number. It was a small thick iil !e,
worn quite round at the edges. Dinah laid it sidewaxs en
the window ledge, where the light was strongest, and ll ( n
opened it with her forefinger. The first words she looked at
were those at the top of the left hand page : " And they all
wept sore, and fell cTn Paul's neck and kissed him." Tl at
was enough for Dinah ; she had opened on that memorable
parting at Ephesus, when Paul had felt bound to open his
heart in a last exhortation and warning. She hesitated no
longer, but opening her own door gently, went and tapped at
Hetty's. We know she had to tap twice, because Hetty had
to put out her candles and throw off her black lace scarf ;
but after the second tap the door was opened immediately.

146 ADAM BEDS.

Dinah said, " Will you let me come in, Hetty ? " and Hetty,
without speaking, for she was confused and vexed, opened
the door wider and let her in.

What a strange contrast the two figures made I Visible
enough in that mingled twilight and moonlight. Hetty, her
cheeks flushed and her eyes glistening from her imaginary
drama, her beautiful neck and arms bare, her hair hanging in
a curly tangle down her back, and the baubles in her ears.
Dinah, covered with her long white dress, her pale face full
of subdued emotion, almost like a lovely corpse into which
the soul has returned charged with sublimer secrets and a
sublimer love. They were nearly of the same height ; Dinah
evidently a little the taller as she put her arm round Hetty's
waist, and kissed her forehead.

" I knew you were not in bed, my dear," she said, in her
sweet clear voice, which was irritating to Hettv, mingling
with her own peevish vexation like music with jangling chains,
" for I heard you moving ; and I longed to speak to you
again to-night, for it is the last but one that I shall be liere,
and we don't know what may happen to-morrow to keep us
apart. Shall I sit down with you while youdoup your hair ?"

" Oh yes," said Hetty, hastily turning round and reaching
the second chair in the room, glad that Dinah looked as if
she did not notice her earrings.

Dinah sat down, and Hetty began to brush together her
hair before twisting it up, doing it with that air of excessive
indifference which belongs to confused self-consciousness.
But the expression of Dinah's eyes gradually relieved her ;
they seemed unobservant of all details.

" Dear Hetty," she said, " it has been borne in upon my
mind to-night that you may some day be in trouble — trouble
is appointed for us all here below, and there comes a time
when we need more comfort and help than the things of this
life can give. I want to tell you that if ever you are in trou-
ble and need a friend that will always feel for you and love
you, you have got that friend in Dinah Morris at Snowfield ;
and if you come to her, or send for her, she'll never forget
this night and the words she is speaking to you now, Will
you remember it, Hetty.? "

" Yes," said Hetty, rather frightened. " But why s^iould
you think I shall be in trouble ? Do you know of any-
thing ' "

Hetty had seated herself as she tied on her cap, and now
Dinah leaned forward and took hei: hands and answered—

ADAM BEDE. 1 47

"Because, dear, trouble comes to us all in this life ; we
set our hearts on things which it isn't God's will for us to
have, and then we go sorrowing ; the people we love are
taken from us, and we can jo}' in nothing because they are
not with us ; sickness comes, and w^e faint under the burden
of our feeble bodies ; we go astray and do wrong, and bring
ourselves into trouble with our fellow-men. There is no man
or woman born into this world to whom some of these trials
do not fall, and so I fall, and so I feel that some of them
must happen to you ; and I desire for you, that while 3'ou are
young you should seek for strength from your Heavenly
Father, that you may have a support which will not fail you in
the evil day."

Dinah paused and released Hetty's hands, that she might
not hinder her. Hetty sat quite still ; she felt no response
within herself to Dinah's anxious affection ; but Dinah's
words, uttered with solemn, pathetic distinctness, affected her
with a chill fear. Her fiush had died away almost to pale-
ness ; she had the timidity of a luxurious pleasure-seeking
nature, which shrinks from the hint of pain. Dinah saw the
effect, and her tender, anxious pleading became the most
earnest, till Hetty, full of a vague fear that something evil
was sometime to befall her, began to cry.

It is our habit to say that while the lower nature can
never understand the higher, the higher nature commands a
complete view of the lower. But I think the higher nature
has to learn this comprehension, as we learn the art of vision,
by a good deal of hard experience, often with bruises and
gashes incurred in taking things up by the wrong end, and
fancying our space wider than it is, Dinah had never seen
Hetty affected in this way before, and, with her usual benig-
nant hopefulness, she trusted it was the stirring of a divine im-
pulse. She kissed the sobbing thing, and began to crv with
her for grateful joy. But Hetty was simply in that excitable
state of mind in which there is no calculating what turn the
feelings may take from one moment to another, and for the
first time she became irritated under Dinah's caress. She
pushed her away impatiently, and said with a childish sob-
bing voice,

" Don't talk to me so, Dinah. Why do you come to
frighten me ? I've never done anything to you. Why can't
you let me be ? "

Poor Dinah felt a pang. She was too wise to persist, and
only said mildly, " Yes, my dear, you're tired ; I won't hindei

148 ADA A/ BEDE.

you any longer. Make haste and get into bed. Good
night."

She went out of the r om ahnost as quietly and quickly
as if she had been a ghost ; but once by the side of her own
bed, she threw herself on her knees, and poured out in deep
silence all the passionate pity that filled her heart.

As for Hetty, she was soon in the wood again — her wak-
ing dreams being merged in a sleeping life scarcely more
fragmentary and confused

CHAPTER XVL

LINKS.

Arthur Uonnithorne, you remember, is under an en-
gagement with himself to go and see Mr. Irwine this Friday
morning, and he is awake and dressing so early, that he de-
termines to go before breakfast, instead of after. The rector,
he knows, breakfasts alon£ at half-past nine, the ladies of the
family having a different breakfast hour ; Arthur will have an
early ride over the hill and breakfast with him. One can say
everything best over a meal.

The progress of civilization has made a breakfast or a
dinner an easy and cheerful substitute for more trouble-
some and disagreeable ceremonies. We take a less gloomy
view of our errors now our father confessor listens to us over
his egg and coffee. We are more distinctly conscious that
rude penances are out of the question for gentlemen in an en-
lightened age, and that mortal sin is not incompatible with an
appetite for muffins; an assault on our pockets, which in
more barbarous times would have been made in the brusque
form of a pistol-shot, is quite a well-bred and smiling proce-
dure now it has become a request for a loan thrown in as an
easy parenthesis between the second and third glasses of
claret.

Still, there was this advantage in the old rigid forms, that
they committed you to the fulfillment of a resolution by some
outward deed. When you have put your mouth to one end of
a hole in a stone wall, and are aware that there is an expect-
ant ear on the other end, you are moie likely to say what you

ADAM BEDE. I49

came out with the intention of saying, than if you were seated
with your legs in an easy attitude under the mahogany, with
a companion who will have no reason to be surprised if you
have nothing particular to say.

However, Arthur Donnithorne, as he winds among the
pleasant lanes on horseback in the morning sunshine, has a
sincere determination to open his heart to the rector, and the
swirling sound of the scythe as he passes by the meadow is
all the pleasanter to him because of this honest purpose. He
is glad to see the promise of settled weather now for getting
in the hay, about which the farmers have been fearful ; and
there is something so healthful in the sharing of a joy that is
general and not merely personal, that this thought about the
hay-harvest reacts on his state of mind, and makes his resolu-
tion seem an easier matter, A man about town might per-
haps consider that these influences were not to be felt out of
a child's story-book ; but when you are among the fields and
hedgerows, it is impossible to maintain a consistent superiority
to simple, natural pleasures.

Arthur had passed the village of Hayslope, and was ap-
proaching the Broxton side of the hill, when, at a turning in
the road, he saw a figure about a hundred yards before him
which it was impossible to mistake for any one else than
Adam Bede, even if there had been no gray, tailless shepherd
dog at his heels. He was striding along at his usual rapid
pace, and Arthur pushed on hi„ horse to overtake him ; for
he retained too much of his boyish feeling for Adam to miss
an opportunity of chatting with him. I will not say that his
love for that good fellow did not owe some of its force to the
love of patronage ; our friend Arthur liked to do everything
that was handsome, and to have his handsome deeds rec-
ognized.

Adam looked round as he heard the quickening clatter of
the horse's heels, and waited for the horseman, lifting his
paper cap from his head with a bright smile of recognition.
Next to his own brother, Seth, Adam would have done more
for Arthur Donnithorne than for any other young man in the
world. There was hardlj anything he would not rather have
lost than the two-feet ruler which he always carried in his
pocket ; it was Arthur's present, bought with his pocket-money
when he was a fair-haired lad of eleven, and when he had pro-
fited so well by Adam's lessons in carpentering and turning,
as to embarrass every female in the house with gifts of super-
fluous thread-reels and round boxes. Adam had quite a

15°

ADAAf BEDE.

pride in llie little squire in those early days, and the feeling
had only become slightly modified as the fair-haired lad had
grown into the whiskered young man. Adam, I confess, was
very susceptible to the influence of rank, and quite ready to
give an extra amount of respect to every one who had more
advantages than himself, not being a philosopher, or a prole-
taire with democratic ideas, but simply a stout-limbed, clever
carpenter with a large fund of reverence in his nature, which
inclined him to admit all established claims unless he saw
very clear grounds for questioning them. He had no theories
about setting the world to-rights, but he saw there was ag;eat
deal of damage done by building with ill-seasoned timber —
by ignorant men in fine clothes making plans for out-houses
and workshops, and the like, without knowing the bearings of
things — by slovenly joiners' work, and by hasty contracts
that could never be fulfilled without ruining somebody ; and
he resolved, for his part, to set his face against such doings.
On these points he would have maintained liis opinion against
the largest landed proprietor in Loamshire or Stonyshire
either ; but he felt that beyond these it would be better for
him to defer to people who were more knowing than himself.
He saw as plainly as possible how ill the woods on the estate
were managed, and the shameful state of the farm-buildings ;
and, if old Squire Donnithorne had asked him the effect of
this mismanagement, he would have spoken his opinion with-
out flinching, but the impulse to a respectful demeanor to-
ward a "gentleman "would have been strong within him all
the while. The word "gentleman" had a spell for Adam,
and, as he often said, he "couldn't abide a fellow who thought
he made himself fine by being coxy to's betters." I must re-
mind you again that Adam had the blood of the peasant in
his veins, and that, since he was in his prime half a century
a o, you must expect some of his characteristics to be obso-
k'te.

Toward the young squire this instinctive reverence of
Atlam's was assisted by boyish memories and personal regard ;
so you may imagine that he thought far more of Arthur's
good qualities, and attached far more value to very slight ac-
tions of his, than if they had been the qualities and actions
of a common workman like himself. He felt sure it would be
a fine day for everybody about Hayslope when the youngsquire
came into the estate — sucii a generous open-hearted disposi-
tion as he had, and an ''uncommon " notion about improve-
ments and repairs, considering he was only just coming ol

ADAM BEDE. jri

age. Thus there was both respect and affection in the
smile with which he raised his paper cap as Arthur Donni-
throne rode up.

" Well, Adam, how are you ? " said Arthur, holding out
his hand. He never shook hands with any of the farmers,
and Adam felt the honor keenly. " I could swear to your
back a long way off. It's just the same back only broader,
as when you used to czxvj me on it. Do you remember? "

" Ay, sir, I remember. It 'ud be a poor look-out if folks
didn't remember what they did and said when they were lads.
We should think no more about old friends than we do about
new uns, then."

" You're going to Broxton, I suppose ? " said Arthur, put-
ting his horse on at a slow pace while Adam walked by his
side " Are you going to the Rectory ? "

'_' No, sir, I'm going to see about Bradwell's barn. They're
afraid of the roof pushing the walls out ; and I'm going to see
what can be done with it, before we send the stuff and the
workmen."

•'Why, Burge trusts almost ever\-thing to you now, Adam,
doesn't he ? I should think he will make you his partner
soon. He will if he's wise."

" Nay, sir, I don't see as he'd be much the better off for
that. A foreman, if he's got a conscience, and delights in his
work, will do his business as well as if he was a partner. I
wouldn't give a penny for a man as 'ud drive a nail in slack
because he didn't get extra pay for it."

" I know that, Adam ; I know you work for him as well
as if you were working for yourself. But you would have
more power than you have now, and could turn the business
to better account, perhaps. The old man must give up his
business some time, and he has no son ; I suppose he'll want
a son-in-law who can take to it. But he has rather grasping
fingers of his own, I fancy ; I dare say he wants a man who
can put some money into the business. If I wer n t as poor
as a rat, I would gladly invest some money in that way, for
the sake of having you settled on the estate. I'm sure I
should profit by it in thq end. And perhaps I shall be better
off in a year or two. I shall have a larger allowance now I'm
of age \ and when I've paid off a debt or two I shall be able
to look about me."

" You're very good to say so, sir, and I'm not unthankful.
But." Adam continued in a decided tone, " I shouldn't like to
make any offers to Mr. Burge, or t' have any made for me,

152

ADAM BEDE.

I see no clear road to a partnership. If he shouia ever want
to dispose o' the business, that 'ud be a different matter. I
should be glad of some money at a fair interest then, for I
feel sure I could pay if off in time."

" Yery well, Adam," said Arthur, remem.bering what Mr.
Irwine had said about a probable hitch in the love-making
between Adam and Mary Burge, " we'll say no more about it
at present. When is your father to be buried .-' "

"On Sunday, sir ; Mr. Irwine's coming earlier on purpose.
I shall be glad when it's over, for I think my mother 'ull per-
haps get easier then. It cuts one sadly to see the grief of old
people ; they've no way of working it off ; and the new spring
brings no new shoots out on the withered tree."

'•Ah! you've had a good deal of trouble and vexation in
your life, Adam. I don't think you've ever been hairbrained
and light-hearted, like other youngsters. You've always had
some care on your mind ? "

" Why, yes, sir ; but that's nothing to make a fuss about.
If we're men and have men's feelings, I reckon we must have
men's troubles. We can't be like the birds as fly from their
nests as soon as they've got their wings, and never know their
kin when they see 'em, and get a fresh lot every year. I've
had enough to be thankful for ; I've allays had health and
strength and brains to give me a delight in my work ; and I
count it a great thing as I've had Bartle Massey's night-school
to go to. He's helped me too knowledge I could never ha' got
by myself."

" What a rare fellow you are, Adam ! " said Arthur, after
a pause, in which he had looked musingly at the big fellow
walking by his side. " I could hit out better than most men
at Oxford, and yet I believe you would knock me into next
week if I were to have a battle with you."

" God forbid I should ever do that, sir," said Adam, look-
ing round at Arthur, and smiling. " I used to fight for fun ;
but I've never done that since I was the cause o' poor Gil
Tranter being laid up for a fortnight, I'll never fight any
man again only when he behaves like a scoundrel. If you
get hold of a chap that's got no shame nor conscience to stop
him, you must try what you can do by bunging his eyes up."

Arthur did not laugh, for he was preoccupied with some
thought that made him say presently,

" I should think now, Adam, you never have anv stru?;-
gles within yourself. I fancy you would master a wish that
you had made up your mind it was not quite right to indulge,

ADAM BEnE. j , ^

as easily as you would knock a drunken fellow down who was
quarrelsome with you. I mean, you are never shilly-shally,
tirst making up your mind that you won't do a thing, and then
doing it after all."

"Well," said Adam slowly, after a moment's hesitation,
" no, I don't remember ever being see-saw in that wav, when
I'd made my mind up, as you say, that a thing was wrong. It
takes the taste out o' my mouth for things, when I know I
should have a heavy conscience after 'em. I've seen pretty
clear, ever since I could cast up a sum, as you can never do
what's wrong without breeding sin and trouble more than you
can ever see. It's like a bit o' bad workmanship — you ne'ver
see the end o' the mischief it'll do. And it's a poor look out
to come into the world to make your fellow-creatures worse off
instead o' better. But there's a difference between the things
folks call wrong. I'm not for making a sin of every little
fool's trick, or bit o' nonsense anybody may be let into, like
some o' them dissenters. And a man' may have two minds
whether it isn't worth while to get a bruise or two for the
sake of a bit o' fun. But it isn't my way to be see-saw about
anything ; I think my fault lies th' other way. When I've said
a thing, if it's only to myself, it's hard for me to go back."

"Yes, that's just what I expected of you," said Arthur.
" You've got an iron will, as well as an iron arm. But, how-
ever strong a man's resolution may be, it costs him something
to carry it out, now and then. 'We may determine not to
gather any cherries, and keep our hands sturdily in our
pockets, but we can't prevent our mouths from watering."

" That's true, sir ; but there's nothing like settling with
ourselves, as there's a deal we must do without i' this life.
It's no use looking on life as if it was Treddles'on fair, where
folks only go to see shows and get fairings. If we do, we
shall find it different. But where's the use o' me talking
to you, sir.? You know better than I do."

" I'm not sure of that, Adam. You've had four or five
years' experience more than I've had. and I think your life
has been a better school to you than college has been to me."

"Why, sir, you seem to think o' college something like
wliat Bartle Massey does. He says college mostlv makes
people like bladders— just good for' nothing but t' hold the
stuff as is poured into 'em. But he's got a tongue like a sharp
blade, Bartle has \ it never touches anything but it cuts.
Here's the turning, sir. I must bid you good-morning, as
you're going to the Rectory."

<S4

ADAM BEDE.

" Good-by, Adam, good-by."

Arthur gave his horse to the groom at the Rectory gate,
and walked along the gravel toward the door which opened
on the garden. He knew that the rector always breakfasted
in his study, and the study lay on the left hand of this door,
opposite the dining-room. It was a small, low room belong-
to the old part of the house — dark with the sobre covers ot
the books that lined the walls ; yet it looked very cheery this
morning as Arthur reached the open window. For the morn-
ing sun fell aslant on the great glass globe with the goldfish
in it, which stood on a scagliola pillar in front of the ready-
spread bachelor breakfast-table, and by the side of this break'
fast-table was a group which would have made any room en-
ticing. In the crimson demask easy-chair sat Mr, Irwine,
with that radiant freshness which he always had when became
from his morning toilette ; his finely-formed, plump white
hand was playing along Juno's brown curly back ; and close
to Juno's tail, which was wagging with calm matronly pleasure,
the two brown pups were rolling over each other in an ecsta-
tic duet of worrying noises. On a cushion a little removed
sat Pug, with the air of a maiden lady who looked on these
familiarities as animal weaknesses, which she made as little
show as possible of observing. On the table, at Mr. Irwine's
elbow, lay the first volume of the Foulis ^Eschylus, which
Arthur knew well by sight ; and the silver coffee-pot, which
Carrol was bringing in, sent forth a fragrant steam, which
completed the delights of a bachelor breakfast.

" Halloo, Arthur, that's a good fellow ! You're just in
time," said Mr. Irwine, as Arther paused and stepped in over
the low window-sill. " Carrol, we shall want more coffee and
eggs, and haven't you got some cold fowl for us to eat with
that ham ? Why, this is like old days, Arthur ; you haven't
been to breakfast with me these five years."

" It was a tempting morning for a ride before breakfast,"
said Arthur, " and I used to like breakfasting with you so
when I was reading with you. My grandfather is always a
few degrees colder at breakfast than at any other hour in the
day. I think his morning bath doesn't agree with him."

Arthur was anxious not to imply that he came with any
special purpose. He had no sooner found himself in Mr. Ir-
wine's presence than the confidence which he had thought
quite easy before suddenly appeared the most difficult thing
in the world to him, and at the very moment of shaking hands
he saw his purpose in quite a new light. How could he make

ADAM BEDE.

155

Irwine understand his position unless he told him those little
scenes in the wood, and how could he tell them without look-
ing like a fool ? And then his weakness in coming back from
Gawaine's, and doing the very opposite of what he intended ?
Irwine would think him a shilly-shally fellow ever after.
However, it must come out in an unpremeditated way ; the
conversation might lead up to it.

" I like breakfast-time better than any other moment in
the day," said Mr. Irwine. " No dust has settled on one's
mind then, and it presents a clear mirror to the rays of things.
I always have a favorite book by me at breakfast, and I
enjoy the bits I pick up then so much that, regularly every
morning, it seems to me as if I should certainly become
studious again. But presently Dent brings up a poor fellow
who has killed a hare, and when I've got through my
' justicing,' as Carrol calls it, I'm inclined for a ride round the
glebe, and on my way back I meet with the master of the
work-house, who has got a long story of a mutinous pauper to
tell me ; and so the day goes on, and I'm always the same
lazy fellow before evening sets in. Besides, one wants the
stimulus of sympathy, and I have never had that since poor
D'Oyley left Treddleston. If you had stuck to your books
well, you rascal, I should have had a pleasanter prospect
before me. But scholarship doesn't run in your family blood."

"No, indeed. It's well if I can remember a little inap-
plicable Latin to adorn my maiden speech in Parliament six
or seven years hence. ' Cras ingens iterabimus jequor,' and a
few shreds of that sort will perhaps stick to me, and I shall
arrange my opinions so as to introduce them. But I don't
think a knowledge of the classics is a pressing want to a
country gentleman ; as far as I can see, he'd much better
have a knowledge of manures. I've been reading your friend
Arthur Young's books lately, and there's nothing I should
like better than to carry out some of his ideas in putting the
farmers on a better management of their land, and, as he
says, making what was a wild country, all of the same dark
hue, bright and variegated with corn and cattle. My grand-
father will never let me have any power while he lives ; but
there's nothing I should like better than to undertake the
Stonyshire side of the estate — it's in a dismal condition — and
set improvements on foot, and gallop about from one place
to another and overlook them. I should like to know all the
laborers, and see them touching their hats to me with a look
of good-will."

1^6 ADAM BEDS.

" Bravo, Arthur ; a man who has feeling for the classics
couldn't make a better apology for coming into the world
than by increasing the quantity of food to maintain scholars,
and rectors who appreciate scholars. And, whenever you
enter on your career of model landlord, may I be there to see.
You'll want a portly rector to complete the picture, and take
his tithe of all the respect and honor you get by your hard
work. Only don't set your heart too strongly on the good-
will you are to get in consequence. I'm not sure that men
are the fondest of those who try to be useful to them. You
know Gawaine has got the curses of the whole neighborhood
upon him about that inclosure. You must make it quite
clear to your mind which you are most bent upon, old boy —
popularity or usefulness — else you may happen to miss both."

" Oh, Gawaine is harsh in his manners ; he doesn't make
himself personally agreeable to his tenants. I don't believe
there's anything you can't prevail on people to do with kind-
ness. For my part, I couldn't live in the neighborhood where
I was not respected and beloved ; it's very pleasant to go
among the tenants here, they all seem so well inclined to me.
I suppose it seems only the other day to them since I was a
little lad, riding on a pony about as big as a sheep. And if
fair allowance were made to them, and their buildings attended
to, one could persuade them to farm on a better plan, stupid
as they are."

" Then mind you fall in love in the right place, and don't
get a wife who will drain your purse and make you niggardly
in spite of yourself. My mother and I have a little discus-
sion about you sometimes : she says, ' I'll never risk a single
prophecy on Arthur until I see the woman he falls in love
with.' She thinks your lady-love will rule vou as the moon
rules the tides. But I feel bound to stand up for you, as my
pupil, you know ; and I maintain that you're not of that
watery quality. So mind you don't disgrace my judgment."

Arthur winced under this speech, for keen old Mrs.
Irwine's opinion about him had the disagreeable effect nf
a sinister omen. This, to be sure, was only another reason
for persevering in his intention, and getting an additional
security against himself. Nevertheless, at this point in the
conversation, he was conscious of increased disinclination to
tell his story about Hetty. He was of an impressible nature,
and lived a great deal in other people's opinions and feelings
concerning himself ; and the mere fact that he was in the
presence of an intimate friend, who had not the slightest

' ADAM BEDS. i^y

notion that he haa had any such serious internal struggle as
he came to confide, rather shook his own belief in the serious-
ness of the struggle. It was not, after all, a thing to make
a fuss about, and what could Irwine do for him that he could
not do for himself? He would go to Eagledale in spite of
Meg's lameness— go on Rattler, and Pym follow as well as
he could on the old hack. That was his thought as he sug-
ared his coffee ; but the next minute, as he was lifting the
cup to his lips, he remembered how thoroughly he had made
up his mind last night to tell Irwine. No ! he would not be
vacillating again — he would diO what he had meant to do this
time. So it would be well not to let the personal tone of tlie
conversation altogether drop. If they went to quite indifferent
topics, his difficulty would be heightened. It had required no
noticeable pause for this rush and rebound of feeling, before
he answered,

" But I think it is hardly an argument against a man's
general strength of character, that he should be apt to be
mastered by love. A fine constitution doesn't insure one
against smallpox or any other of those inevitable diseases.
A man may be very firm in other matters, and yet be under
a sort of witchery from a woman."

" Yes \ but there's this difference between love and small-
pox, or bewitchment either — that if you delect the disease at
an early stage and try change of air there is every chance of
complete escape, without any farther development of symp-
toms. And there are certain alterative doses which a man
may administer to himself by keeping unpleasant consequences
before his mind ; that gives you a sort of smoked glass
through which you may look at the resplendent fair oi-ie and
discern her true outline ; though I'm afraid, by the bye, the
smoked glass is apt to be missing just at the moment it is
most wanted. I dare say, now, even a man fortified with a
knowledge of the classics might be lured into an imprudent
marriage, in spite of the warning given him by the chorus in
the Prometheus."

The smile that flitted across Arthur's face was a faint one,
and instead of following Mr. Irwine's playful lead he said
quite seriously, " Yes, that's the worst of it. It's a desper^
ately vexatious thing that, after all one's reflections and quiet
determinations, we should be ruled by moods that one can't
calculate on beforehand. I don't think a man ought to be
blamed so much if he is betrayed into doing things in that
way, in spite of his resolutions."

I S3

AVAM BEDE.

" Ah ! but the moods lie in his nature, my boy, just as
must as his reflections did, and more. A man can never
do anything at variance with hii own nature. He carries
within him the germ of his most exceptional action ; and if
we wise people make eminent fools of ourselves on any par-
ticular occasion, we must endure the legitimate conclusion
that we carry a few grains of folly to our ounce of wisdom."

" Well, but one may be betrayed into doing things by a
combination of circumstances, which one might never hav^e
done otherwise."

" Why, yes, a man can't very well steal a bank-note unless
the bank-note lies within convenient reach ; but he won't
make us think him an honest man because he begins to howl
at the bank-note for falling in his way."

" But surely you don't think a man who struggles against
a temptation into which he falls at last as bad as the man
who never struggles at all .'' "

" No, my boy, I pity him, in proportion to his struggles,
for they foreshadow the inward suffering which is the worst
form of Nemesis. Consequences are unpitying. Our deeds
carry their terrible consequences, quite apart from any fluc-
tuations that went before — consequences that are hardly ever
confined to ourselves. And it is best to fix our minds on that
certainty, instead of considering what may be the elements of
excuse for us. But I never knew you so inclined for moral
discussion, Arthur. Is it some danger of your own that you
are considering in this philosophical, general way .-' "

In asking this question Mr. Irwine pushed his plate away,
threw himself back in his chair, and looked straight at Arthur.
He really suspected that Arthur wanted to tell him something
and thought of smoothing the way for him by this direct
question. But he was mistaken. Brought suddenly and
involuntarily to the brink of confession, Arthur shrank back,
and felt less disposed toward it than ever. The conversation
had taken a more serious tone than he had intended — it would
quite mislead Irwine — he would imagine there was a deep
passion for Hetty, while there was no such thing. He was
conscious of coloring, and was annoyed at his boyishness.

" Oh no, no danger," he said, as indifferently as he could.
" I don't know that I am more liable to irresolution than
other people ; only there are little incidents now and then
that set one speculating on what might happen in the future."

Was there a motive at work under this strange reluctance
of Arthur's which had a sort of backstairs influence not ad-
mitted to himself? Our nxeatal business is carried on much

ADAM BEDE. j-q

in the same way as the business of the state : a great deal of
hard work is done by agents who are not acknowledged. In
a piece of machinery, too, I believe there is often a small,
unnoticeable wheel which has a great deal to do with the
motion of the large, obvious ones. Possibly there was some
such unrecognized agent secretly busy in Arthur's mind at
this moment — possibly it was the fear lest he might hereafter
find the fact of having made a confession to the rector a
serious annoyance, in case he should 7iot be able quite to carry
out his good resolutions ! I dare not assert that it was not
so. The human soul is a very complex thing.

The idea of Hetty had just crossed Mr. Irwine's mind as
he looked inquiringly at Arthur, but his disclaiming, indif-
ferent answer confirmed the thought which had quickly fol-
lowed— that there could be nothing serious in that direction.
There was no probability that Arthur ever saw her except at
church, and at her own home under the eye of Mrs. Poyser •
and the hint he had given Arthur about her the other day
had no more serious meaning than to prevent him from notic-
ing her so as to rouse the little chit's vanity, and in this way
to perturb the rustic drama of her life. Arthur would soon
join his regiment, and be far away; no, there could be no
danger in that quarter, even if Arthur's character had not
been a strong security against it. His honest, patronizing
pnde m the good-will and respect of everybody about him
was a safeguard even against foolish romance, still more
agamst a lower kind of folly. If there had been anything
special on Arthur's mind in the previous conversation, it was
clear he was not inclined to enter into details, and Mr Irwine
was too delicate to imply even a friendly curiosity. He per-
ceived a change of subject would be welcome and said,

" By the way, Arthur, at your colonel's birthday fete there
were some transparencies that made a great effect, in honor
of Britannia, and Pitt, and the Loamshire Militia, and, above
all, the 'generous youth,' the hero of the dav. Don't you
think you should get up something of the same sort to aston-
ish our weak minds .? "

The opportunity was gone. While Arthur was hesitating,
the rope to which he might have clung had drifted away— he
must trust now to his own swimming.

^ In ten minutes from that time Mr. Irwine was called for
on business, and Arthur, bidding him good-by, mounted his
horse again with a sense of dissatisfaction, which he tried to
quell by determining to set off for Eagledale w'thout an hour's
delay.

i 60 ADAM BEDS,

CHAPTER XVIL

IN WHICH THE STORY PAUSES A LITTLE.

This rector of Broxton, is little better than a pagan ! "
I hear one of my lady readers exclaim. " How much more
edifying it would have been if j'ou had made him give Arthur
some truly spiritual advice. You might have put into his
mouth the most beautiful things — quite as good as reading a
sermon."

Certainly I could, my fair critic, if 1 were a clever novelist,
not obliged to creep servilely after nature and fact, but able
to represent things as they never have been and never will be.
Then, of course, my characters will be entirely of my own
choosing, and 1 could select the most unexceptionable type
of clergyman, and put my own admirable opinions into his
mouth on all occasions. But you must have perceived long
ago that I have no such lofty vocation, and that I aspire to
give no more than a faithful account of men and things as
they have mirrored themselves in my mind. The mirror is
doubtless defective ; the outlines will sometimes be disturbed ;
the reflection faint or confused ; but I feel as much bound to
tell you, as precisely as I can, what that reflection is, as if I
were in the witness-box narrating my experience on oath.

Sixty years ago — it is a long time, so no wonder things
have changed — all clergymen were not zealous ; indeed there
is reason to believe that the number of zealous clergymen was
small, and it is probable that if one among the small minority
had owned the livings of Broxton and Hayslope in the year
1799, you would have liked him no better than you like Mr.
Irwine. Ten to one, you would have thought him a tasteless,
indiscreet, methodistical man. It is so very rarely that facts
hit that nice medium required by our own enliglUened opinions
and refined taste ! Perhaps you will say, " Do improve the
facts a little, then : make them more accordant with those
correct viev/s which it is our privilege to possess. The world
is not just what we like ; do touch it up with a tasteful pencil,
and make believe it is not quite sucii a mixed, entangled
affair. Let all people who hold unexceptionable opinions act
unexceptionably. Let your most faulty characters always be
on the wrong side, and your virtuous one on the right. Then
we shall see at a glance whom we are to condemn, and whom

ADAM BEDE. l6l

we are to approve. Then we shall be able to admire, without
the slightest disturbance of our prepossessions ; we shall hate
and despise with that true ruminant relish which belongs to
undoubting confidence."

But, my good friend, what will you do then with your fel-
low-parishioner who opposes your husband in the vestry ? —
with your newly appointed vicar, whose style of preaching
you find painfully below that of his regretted predecessor ? —
with the honest servant who worries your soul with her one
failing? — with vf ur neighbor, Mrs, Green, who was really kind
to you in your last illness, but has said several ill-natured
things about you since your convalescence ? — nay, with your
excellent husband itself, who has other irritatmg habits be-
sides that of not wiping his shoes ? These fellow-mortals,
ever^ one, must be accepted as they are , you can neither
staighten ther noses, nor straighten their vit, not rectify their
dispositions ; and it is these people — among whom your life is
passed — that it is needful your should tolerate, pity, and love ;
it is these more or less ugly, stupid, inconsistent people,
whose movements of goodness you should be able to admire
' — for whom you should cherish all possible hopes, all possible
patience. And I would not, even if I had the choice, be the
elever novelist who could create a world so much better than
this, in which we get up in the morning to do our daily work,
that you would be likely to turn a harder, colder eye on the
dusty streets and the common green fields — on the real
breathing men and women, who can be chilled by your indif-
ference or injured by your prejudice ; who can be cheered
and helped onward by your fellow-feeling, your forbearance,
your outspoken, brave justice.

So I am content to tell my simple story, without trying to
make things seem better than they were ; dreading nothing,
indeed, but falsity, which, in spite of one's best efforts, there
is reason to dread. Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult.
The pencil is conscious of a delightful facility in drawing a
griffin — the longer the claws, and the larger the wings, the
better ; but that marvellous facility, which we mistook for
genius, is apt to forsake us when we want to draw a real un-
exaggerated lion. Examine your words well, and you will
find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a
very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your own
immediate feelings — much harder than to say something fine
about them which is 7iot the exact truth.

It is for this rare, precious quality of truthfulness that I

1(52 ADAM BEDS.

delight in many Dutch paintings, which lofty-minded people
despise. I find a source of delicious sympathy in these
faithful pictures of a monotonous homely existence, which has
been the fate of so many more among my fellow-mortals than
a life of pomp or of absolute indigence, of tragic suffering or
of world-stirring actions. I turn, without shrinking, from
cloud-borne angels, from prophets, sibyls, and heroic warriors,
to an old woman bending over her flower-pot, or eating her
solitary dinner, while the noonday light, softened, perhaps by
a screen of leaves, falls on her mob-cap, and just touches the
rim of her spinning-wheel, and her stone jug, and all those
cheap, common things which are the precious necessaries of
iife to her ; or I turn to that village wedding, kept between
four walls, where an awkward bridegroom opens the dance
with a high-shouldered, broad-faced bride, while elderly and
middle-aged friends look on, with very irregular noses and
lips, and probably with quart pots in their hands, but with
an expression of unmistakable contentment and good-will.
" Foh ! " says my idealistic friend, " what vulgar details !
What good is there in taking all these pains to give an exact
likeness of old women and clowns .'' What a low phase of
life ! what clumsy, ugly people ! "

But, bless us, things may be lovable that are not altogether
handsome, I hope ? I am not at all sure that the majority of
the human race have not been ugly, and even among those
"lords of their kind," the British, squat figures, ill-shapen
nostrils, and dingy complexions, are not startling exceptions.
Yet there is a great deal of family love among us. I have a
friend or two whose class of features is such that the Apollo
curl on the summit of their brows would be decidedly trying ;
yet, to my certain knowledge, tender hearts have beaten for
them, and their miniatures — flattering, but still not lovely —
are kissed in secret by motherly lips. I have seen many an
excellent matron, who could never in her best days have been
handsome, and yet she had a packet of yellow love-letters in
a private drawer, and sweet children showered kisses on her
sallow cheeks. And I believe there have been plenty of 3'oung
heroes, of middle stature and feeble beards, who have felt
quite sure they could never love anything more insignificant
then a Diana, and yet have found themselves in middle life
happily settled with a wife who waddles. Yes ! thank God j
human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth \
it does not wait for beauty — it flows with resistless force, and
brings beauty with it.

ADAM- BEDS. X63

All honor and reverence to the divine beauty of form I
Let us cultivate it to the utmost in men, women, and children
— in our gardens and in our houses ; but let us love that
other beauty, too, which lies in no secret of proportion, but
in the secret of deep human sympatiiy. Paint us an angel,
if you can,. with a floating violet robe, and a face paled by the
celestial light ; paint us yet oftener a Madonna, turning her
mild face upward, and opening her arms to welcome the
divine glory ; but do not impose on us any aesthetic rules
which shall banish from the region of Art those old women
scraping carrots with their work-worn hands, those heavy
clowns taking holiday in a dingy pot-house — those rounded
backs and stupid, weather-beaten faces that have bent over
the spade and done the rough work of the world — those
homes with their tin pans, their brown pitchers, their rough
curs, and their clusters of onions. In this world there are so
many of these common, coarse people, who have no pic-
turesque sentimental wretchedness ! It is so needful we
should remember their existence, else we may happen to
leave them quite out of our religion and philosophy, and
frame lofty theories which only fit a world of extremes.
Therefore let Art always remind us of them ; therefore let us
always have men ready to give the loving pains of a life to
the faithful representing of commonplace things — men who
see beauty in these commonplace things, and delight in show-
ing how kindly the light of heaven falls on them. There are
few prophets in the world — few sublimely beautiful Avomen —
few heroes. I can't afford to give all my love and reverence
to such rarities ; I want a great deal of those feelings for my
every-day fellow-men, especially for the few in the foreground
of the great multitude, whose faces I know, whose hands I
touch, for whom I have to make way with kindly courtesy.
Neither are picturesque lazzaroni or romantic criminals half
so frequent as your common laborer, who gets his own bread,
and eat its vulgarly but creditably with his own pocket-knife.
It is more needful that I should have a fibre of sympathy con-
necting me with that vulgar citizen who weighs out my sugar
in a vilely assorted cravat and waistcoat, than with the hand-
somest rascal in red scarf and green feathers ; more needful
that my heart should swell with loving admiration at some
trait of gentle goodness in the faulty people who sit at the
same hearth with me, or in the clergyman of my own parish,
who is, perhaps, rather too corpulent, and in other respects is
not an Oberlin or a Tillotson, than at the deeds of heroei

1 64 ADAM BEDE.

whom I shall never know except by hearsay, or at the sub-
limest abstract of all clerical graces that was ever conceived
by an able novelist.

And so I come back to Mr. Irwine, with whom I desire
you to be in perfect charity, far as he may be from satisfying
your demands on the clerical character. Perhaps you think
he was not — as he ought to have been — a li\ing demonstra-
tion of the benefits attached to the national church ? But I
am not sure of that ; at least I know that the people in Brox-
ton and Hayslope would have been very sorry to part with,
their clergyman, and that most faces brightened at his ap-
proach ; and until it can be proved that hatred is a better
thing for the soul than love, I must believe that Mr. Irwme's
influence in his parish was a more wholesome one than that
of the zealous Mr. Ryde, who came there twenty years after-
ward, when Mr. Irwine had been gathered to his fathers. It
i.: true Mr. Ryde insisted strongly on the doctrines of the
Reformation, visited his flock a great deal in their own homes,
and was severe in rebuking the aberrations of the liesh — put
a stop, indeed, to the Christmas rounds of the church singers,
as promoting drunkenness and too light a handling of sacrec^
things. But I gathered from Adam Bede, to whom I talked
of these matters in his old age, that few clergymen could be
less successful in winning the heaits of their parisiiioners than
Mr. Ryde. They gathered a great many notions about doc-

rine from him, so that almost every church-goer under fifty
"DOgan to distinguish as v/ell between the genuine gospel and

vhat did not come precisely up to that standard, as if he had
been born and bred a Dissenter ; and for some tnne after liis
arrival there seemed to be quite a religious movement in that
quiet rural district. " But,"' said Adam, "I've seen pretty
clear, ever since I was a young un, as religion's something
else besides notions. It isn't notions sets people doing the
right thing — it's feelings. It's the same with the notions in
religion as it is with math'matics — a man maybe able to work
problems straight off in's head, as he sits by the fire and
smokes his pipe; but if he has to make a machine or a build-
ing, he must have a will and a resolution, and love something
else better than his own ease. Somehow, the congregation
began to fall off, and people began to speak light o' Mr. Ryde.
J believe he meant right at b ttom ; but, you see, he was soup
ish-tempered, and was for beating down prices with his people
as worked for hmi ; and his preaching wouldn't go down well
with that sauce. And he v.'anted to be like i -y lord judge i'

ADAM BEDE. 165

the parish, punishing folks for doing wrong ; and he scolded
'em from the pulpit as if he'd been a Ranter, and yet he
couldn't abide the Dissenters, and was a deal more set against
'em than Mr. Irwine was. And then he didn't keep within
his income, for he seemed to think, at first go-off, that six
hundred a year was to make him as big a man as Mr. Don-
nithorne ; that's a sore mischief I've often seen with the poor
curates jumping into a bit of a living all of a sudden. Mr.
Ryde was a deal thought on at a distance, I believe, and he
wrote books ; but as for math'matics and the natur o' things,
he was as ignorant as a woman. He v;as very knowing about
doctrines, and used to call 'em the bulwarks of the Reforma-
uun ; but I've always mistrusted that sort o' learning as leaves
folks foolish and unreasonable about business. Now Mester
Irwine was as different as could be ; as quick ! — he under-
stood what you meant in a minute ; and he knew all about
building, and could see when you'd made a good job. And
he behaved as much like a gentleman to the farmers, and th'
old women, and the laborers, as he did to the gentry. You
never saw him interfering and scolding, and trying to play th'
emperor. Ah ! he was a fine man as ever you set eyes on ;
and so kind to 's mother and sisters. That poor sickly Miss
Anne — he seemed to think more of her than of anybody else
in the world. There wasn't a soul in the parish had a word
to say against him ; and his servants staid with him till they
were so old and pottering he had to hire other folks to do
their work."

"Well," I said, "that was an excellent way of preaching
in the week-days ; but I dare say, if your old friend Mr.
Irwine were to come to life again, and get into the pulpit next
Sunday, you would be rather ashamed that he didn't preach
better after all your praise of him."

" Nay, nay," said Adam, broadening his chest and throw-
ing himself back in his chair, as if he were ready to meet all
inferences, " nobody has ever heard me say Mr. Irwine was
much of a preacher. He didn't go into deep, speritial ex-
perience ; and I know there's a deal in a man's inward life
as you can't measure by the square, and say, ' do this, and
that'll follow, and, 'do that, and this'll follow.' There's
things go on in the soul, and times when feelings come into
you like a rushing mighty wind, as the Scripture says, and
part your life in two a'most, so as you look back on yourself
as if you was soniebodv else. Those are things as you can't
bottle up in a ' do this,' and ' do that ; ' and I'll go so fal

l66 ADAM BEDE.

with the strongest Methodist ever you'll find. That shows
me there's deep, speritial things in religion. You can't make
much out wi' talking about it, but you feel it. Mr. Iiwine
didn't go into those things ; he preached short moral ser-
mons, and that was all. But then he acted pretty much up
to what he said ; he didn't set up for being so different from
other folks one day, and then be as like 'em as two peas the
next. And he made folks love him and respect him, ami
that was better nor stirring up their gall wi' being over busy.
Mrs. Poyser used to say — you know she would have her word
about everything — she said, Mr. Irwine was like a good meal
o' victual — you were the better for him without thinking on
it ; and Mr. Ryde was like a dose o' physic — he griped you
and worreted you, and after all he left you much the same."

" But didn't Mr. Ryde .preach a great deal more about
that spiritual part of religion that you talk of, Adam ?
Couldn't you get more out of his sermons than out of Mr.
Irwine's .'' "

" Eh ! I knowna. He preached a deal about doctrines.
But I've seen pretty clear, ever since I was a young un, as
religion's something Js besides doctrines and notions. I
look at it as if the doctrines were like finding names for your
feelings, so as you can talk of 'em when you've never known
'em, just as a man may talk o' tools when he knows their
names, though he's never so much as seen 'em, still less
handled 'em. I've heard a deal o' doctrine i' my time, for J
used to go after the dissenting preachers along wi' Seth when
I was a lad o' seventeen, and got puzzling myself a deal
about the Arminians and the Calvinists. The Wesleyans,
you know, are strong Arminians ; and Seth, who could never
abide anything harsh, and was always for hoping the best,
held fast by the Wesleyans from the very first ; but I thought
I could pick a hole or two in their notions, and I got disput-
ing wi' one o' the class-leaders down at freddles'on, and
harassed him so, first o' this sid and then o' that, till at last
he said, ' Young man, it's th3 devil making use o' your pride
and conceit as a weapon t war against th, simplicity c' the
truth.' I couldn't help laughing then, but as I was going
home, I thought the man wasn't far wrong„ I began to see
as all this weighing and : iftin^ what this text means and that
text means, and whether f Ike are javed all by God's grace, or
whether there goes an ounco c' th .ir own will to't, was no part
o' real religion at all You ma_, talk o' these things for hours
on end, and you'll only be all the more coxy and conceited

ADAM BEDE. 167

for 't. So I took to going nowhere but to church, and hear-
ing nobody but Mr. Irwine, for he said nothing but what was
go'od, and what you'd be the wiser for remembering. And I
found it better for my soul to be humble before the mysteries
o' God's dealings, and not be making a clatter about what I
could never understand. And they're poor foolish questions
after all ; for what have we got either inside or outside of us
but what' comes from God ? If we've got a resolution to do
right, He gave it to us, I reckon, first or last ; but I see plain
enough we shall never do it without a resolution, and that's
enough for me."

Adam, you perceive, was a warm admirer, perhaps a partial
judge, of Mr. Irwine, as, happily, some of us still are of the
people we have known familiarly. Doubtless it will be de-
spised as a weakness by that lofty order of minds who pant
after the ideal, and are oppressed by a general sense that
their emotions are of too exquisite a character to find fit ob-
jects among their ever}fday fellow-men. I have often been
favored with the confidence of these select natures, and find
them concur in the experience that great men are overesti-
mated and small men are insupportable ; that if you would
love a woman without ever looking back on your love as a
folly, she must die while you are courting her ; and, if you
would maintain the slightest belief in human heroism, you
must never make a pilgrimage to see the hero. I confess I
have often meanly shrunk from confessing to those accom-
plished and acute gentlemen what my own experience has
been. I am afraid I have often smiled with hypocritical as-
sent, and gratified them with an epigram on the fleeting
nature of our illusions, which any one moderately acquainted
with French literature can command at a moment's notice.
Human converse, I think some wise man has remarked, is
not rigidly severe. But I herewith discharge my conscience,
and declare, that I have had quite enthusiastic movements of
admiration toward old gentlemen who spoke the worst Eng-
lish, who were occasionally fretful in their temper, and who
had never moved in a higher sphere of influence than that of
parish overseer ; and that the way in which I have come to
the conclusion that human nature is lovable — the way I have
learnt something of its deep pathos, its sublime mysteries —
has been by living a great deal among people more or less
commonplace and vulgar, of whom you would, perhaps, hear
nothing very surprising if you were to inquire about them in
the neighborhoods where they dwelt. Te« to one most of

1 68 ADAM BEDE.

the sir.all shopkeepers in their vicinity saw nothing at all in
them. For 1 have ob.it;ived this remarkable coincidence,
that the select natures who pant after the ideal, and find
nothing in pantaloons or petticoats great enough to command
their reverence or love, are curiously in unison with the nar-
rowest and pettiest. For example, I have often heard Mr.
Gedge, the landlord of the Royal Oak, who used to turn a
bloodshot eye on his neighbors in the village of Shepperton,
sum up his opinion of the people in his own parish — and they
were all the people he knew — in these emphatic words : "Ay,
sir, I've said it often, and I'll say it again, they're a poor lot
i' this parish — a poor lot, sir, big and little." 1 think he had
a dim idea that if he could migrate to a distant parish, he
might find neighbors worthy of him, and, indeed, he did sub-
sequently transfer himself to the Saracen's Head, which was
doing a thriving business in the back street of a neighboring
market-town. But, oddly enough, he has found rhe people
up that back street of precisely the same stamp as the inhabi-
tants of Shepperton — " a poor lot, sir, big and little, and
them as comes for a go o' gin are no better than them as
comes for a pint o' twopenny — a poor lot."

CHAPTER XVIII.

CHURCH.

" Hetty, Hetty, don't you know church begins at two, and
it's gone half after one a"ready. Have you got nothing better
to think on this good Sunday, as poor old Thias Bede's to be
put into the ground, and him drownded i' the dead o' the
night, as rt's enough to make one's back run cold, but you must
be dizening yourself as if there was a wedding i'stead of a fu-
neral ? "

" Well, aunt," said Hetty, " I can't be ready as soon as
everybody else, when I've got Totty's things to put on. And
I'd ever such work to make her stand still."

Hetty vvas coming down stairs, and Mrs. Poyser, in her
plain bonnet and shawl, was standing below. If ever a girl
looked as if she had been made of roses, that girl was Hetty
in her Sunday hat and frock. For her hat was trimmed with

A£>AAI BEDE. l6g

pink, and her frock had pink spots sprinkled on a white
ground. There was nothing but pink and while about her
except in her dark hair and eyes and her httle buckled shoes!
Mrs. Poyser was provoked at lierseif, for she could hardly
keep irom smiling, as any mortal is inclined to do at the sioht
of pretty round things. So she turned without speaking ajid
joined the group outside the house door, followed by Hetty,
whose heart was fluttering so at the thought of some "one she
expected to see at church, that she hardly felt the ground she
trod on.

And now the little procession set off. Mr. Poyser was in
his Sunday suit oc drab, with a red and green waistcoat, and a
green watch-ribbon, having a large carnelian seal attached,
pendent like a plumb-line from that promontory where his
watch-pocket w^as situated ; a silk handkerchief of a yellow
tone round his neck, and excellent gray ribbed stockings,
knitted by Mrs. Poyser"s own hand, setting off the proportions
of his leg. Mr. Poyser had no reason to be ashamed of his
leg, and suspected that the growing abuse of top-boots and
other fashions tending to disguise the nether limbs, had their
origin in a pitiable degeneracy of the human calf. Still less
had he reason to be ashamed of his round jolly face, which
was good-humor itself as he said, " Come, Hetty — come, httle
uns ! " and, giving his arm to his \vife, led the way through
the causeway gate into the yard.

The " little uns " addressed were Marty and Tommy, boys
of nine and seven, in little fustian tailed coats and knee-
breeches, relieved by rosy cheeks and black eyes ; looking as
much like their father as a very small elephant is like a very
large one. Hetty walked between them, and behind came
patient Molly, whose task it was to carry Totty through the
vard and over all the wet places on the road ; for Totty. hav-
ing speedily recovered from her threatened fever, had insisted
on^^oing to church to-day, and especially on wearing htr red-
and-black necklace outside her tippet. And there were many
wet places for her to be carried over his afternoon, for there
had been heavv showers in the morning, though now the
clouds had rolled off and lay in towering silvery masses on
the horizon.

You might have known it was Sunday if you had only
waked up in the farm-yard. The cocks and hens seenied to
know it. and made only crooning subdued noises ; the very
bull-dog looked less savage.asif hewould have been satisfied
with a smaller bite than usual. The sunshine seemed to call

170

ADAM BEDE.

all things to rest and not to labor ; it was asleep itself on the
moss-grown cow-shed • on the group of white ducks nestling
together with their bills tucked under their wings ; on the old
black sow stretched languidly on the straw, while her largest
young one found an excellent spring bed on his mother's fat
ribs ; on Alick, the shepherd, in his new smock-frock, taking
an uneasy siesta, half-sitting half-standing on the granary
steps. Alick was of opinion that church, like other luxuries,
was not to be indulged in often by a foreman who had the
weather and the ewes on his mind. " Church ! nay — I'n got-
ten summat else to think on," was an answer which he often
uttered in a tone of bitter significance that silenced farther
question. I feel sure Alick meant no irreverence ; indeed, I
know that his mind was not of a speculative, negative cast,
and he would on no account have missed going to church on
Christmas-day, Easter Sunday, and " Whissuntide." But he
had a general impression that public worship and religious
ceremonies, like other non-productive employments, were in-
tended for people who had leisure.

" There's father a-standing at the yard gate," said Martin
Poyser. " I reckon he wants to watch us down the field. It's
wonderful what sight he has, and him turned seventy-five."

" Ah ! I often think it's wi' th' old folks as it is wi' the
babbies," said Mrs. Poyser ; " they're satisfied wi' looking,
no matter what they're looking at. It's God A'mighty's way
o' quietening 'em, I reckon, afore they go to sleep."

Old Martin opened the gate as he saw the family proces-
sion approaching, and held it wide open, leaning on his stick
— pleased to do this bit of work ; for, like all old men whose life
has been spent in labor, he liked to feel that he was still use-
ful— that there was a better crop of onions in the garden be-
cause he was by at the sowing, and that the cows would be
milked the better if he staid at home on a Sunday afternoon
to look on. He always went to church on Sacrament Sun-
days, but not very regularly at other times ; on wet Sundays,
or whenever he had a touch of rheumatism, he used to read
the three first chapters of Genesis instead.

" They'll ha putien Thias Bede i' the ground afore ye get
to the church-yard." he said as his son came up. " It 'ud ha'
been better luck if they'd ha' hurried him i' the forenoon when
the rain was fallin' ; there's no likelihoods of a drop now, an'
the moon lies like a boat there, dost see ? That's a sure sign
o' fair weather ; there 's a many as is false, but that's sure."

" Av. ay." said the son, " I'm in hopes it'll hold up now."

ADAM BEDE. xyi

" Mind what the parson sa\'s — mind what the parson says,
my lads," said grandfather to the black-eyed youngsters in
knee-breeches, conscious of a marble or two in their pockets,
which they looked forward to handling a little, secretly, during
the sermon.

" Dood-by, dandad," said Totty. "Me doin to church.
Me dot my netlace on. Dive me a peppermint."

Grandad, shaking with laughter at this " deep little wench,"
slowly transferred his stick to his left hand, which held the
gate open, and slowly thrust his finger into the waistcoat
pocket on which Totty had fixed her eyes with a confident
look of expectation.

And when they were all gone, the old man leaned on the
gate again, watching them across the lane along the Home
Close, and through the far gate, till they disappeared behind a
bend in the hedge. For the hedgerows in those days shut
out one's view, even on the better-managed farms ; and this
afternoon the dog-roses were tossing out their pink WTeaths,
the night-shade was in its yellow and purple glory, the pale
honey-suckle grew out of reach, peeping high up out of a
holly-bush, over all, an ash or a sycamore every now and then
threw its shadow across the path.

There were acquaintances at other gates who had to move
aside and let them pass ; at the gate of the Home Close there
was half the dairy of cows standing one behind the other, ex-
tremely slow to understand that their large bodies might be
in the way ; at the far gate there was the mare holding her
head over the bars, and beside her the liver-colored foal with
its head towards its mother's flank, apparently still much em-
barrassed by its own straddling existence. The way lay en-
tirely through Mr. Peyser's own fields till they reached the
main road leading to the village, and he turned a keen eye on
the stock and the crops as they went along, while Mrs. Poyser
was ready to supply a running commentary on them all. The
woman who manages a dairy has a large share in making the
rent, so she may well be allowed to have her opinion on stock
and their " keep " — an exercise which strengthens her un-
derstanding so much that she finds herself able to give her
husband advice on most other subjects.

"There's that short-horned Sally," she said, as they en-
tered the Home Close, and she caught sight of the meek beast
that lay chewing the cud, and looking at her with a sleepy
eye. " I begin to hate the sight o' the cow ; and I say now
what I said three weeks ago, the sooner we get rid of her the

172

ADAM BEDE.

better, for there's that I'ttle yallow cow as doesn't give half
the milk, and yet I've twice as much butter from her."

" Why, thee't not like the women in general," said Mr.
Poyser ; *' they like the short-horns, as gives such a lot o'
milk. There's Chowne's wife wants him to buy no other
sort."

" What's it sinnify what Chowne's wife likes ? a poor soft
thing, wi' no more head-piece nor a sparrow. She'd take a
big cullender to strain her lard wi', and then wonder as the
scratchin's run through. I've seen enough of her to know as
I'll niver take a servant from her house again — all hugger-
mugger — and you'd niver know, when you went in, whether
it was Monday or Friday, the wash draggin' on to th' end o'
the week ; and as for her cheese, I know well enough it rose
like a loaf in a tin last year. An' then she talks o' the weather
bein' i' fault, as there's folks 'ud stand on their heads and
then say the fault was i' their boots."

" Well, Chowne's been wantin' to buy Sally, so we can get
rid of her, if thee lik'st," said Mr. Poyser, secretly proud of
his wife's superior power of putting two and two together ; in-
deed, on recent market-days, he had more than once boasted
of her discernment in this very matter of short-horns.

" Ah, them as choose a soft for a wife may's well buy up
the short-horns, for if you get your head stuck in a bog your
legs may's well go after it. Eh I talk o' legs, there's legs for
you," Mrs. Poyser continued, as Totty, who had been set
down now the road was dry, toddled on in front of her father
and mother. " There's shapes ! An' she's got such a long
foot, she'll be her father's own child."

" Ah, she'll be welly such a one as Hetty i' ten years time,
on'y she's got thy colored eyes. I never remember a blue eye
i' my family ; my mother had eyes as black as sloes, just like
Hetty's."

" The child 'uU be none the worse for having ummat as
isn't like Hetty, An' I'm none for having her so over pretty
Though, for the matter o' that, there's people wi' light hair
an' blue eyes as pretty as them wi' black. If Dinah had got
a bit o' color in her cheeks, an' didn't stick that Methodist
cap on her head, enough to frighten the crows, folks 'ud thuik
her as pretty as Hett}-."

"Nay, nay." said Mr. Poyser, with rather a contemptuous
emphasis, " thee dostna know the pints of a woman. The
men 'ud niver run after Dinah as they would after Hetty."

" What care I what the men 'ud run after } It's well seen

ADAM BEDE. I 73

what choice the most of 'em know how to make, by the poor
draggle-tails o' wives you see, like bits o' gauze ribbin, good
for nothing when the color's gone."

" Well, well, thee canstna say but what I know'd how to
make a choice when I married thee," said Mr. Poyser, who
usually settled little conjugal disputes by a compliment of this
sort ; " and thee wast twice as buxom as Dinah ten year ago."

" I niver said a woman had need to be ugly to make a
good missis of a house. There's Chowne's wife ugly enough
to turn the milk an' save the rennet, but she'll niver save noth-
ing any other way. But as for Dinah, poor child, she's niver
likely to be buxom as long as she'll make her dinner o' cake
and water, for the sake o' giving to them as want. She pro
voked me past bearing sometimes ; and, as I told her, she
went clean again' the Scriptur, for that says, ' Love your neigh-
bor as yourself ;' but I said, ' if you loved your neighbor no
better nor you do yourself, Dinah, it's little enough you'd do
for him. You'd be thinking he might do well enough on a
half-empty stomach.' Eh, I wonder where she is this blessed
Sunday ! sitting by that sick woman, I daresay, as she'd set
her heart on going to all of a sudden."

" Ah ! it was a pity she should take such megrims int' her
head, when she might ha' staid wi' us all summer, and eaten
twice as much as she wanted, and it 'ud niver ha' been missed.
She made no odds in th' house at all, for she sat as still at her
sewing as a bird on the nest, and was uncommon nimble at
running to fetch anything. If Hetty gets married, thee'dst
like t' ha' Dinah wi' thee constant."

" It's no use thinking o' that," said Mrs. Poyser. " You
might as well beckon to the flyin' swallow as ask Dinah to
come an' live here comfortable, like other folks. If anything
could turn her, /should ha' turned her, for I've talked to her
for an hour on end, and scolded her too ; for she's my own
sister's child, and it behoves me to do what I can for her. But
eh, poor thing, as soon as she'd said us 'good-by,' an' got into
the car, an' looked back at me with her pale face, as is welly
like her aunt Judith come back from heaven, I begun to be
frightened to think o' the set-downs I'd given her ; for it comes
over you sometimes as if she'd a way o' knowing the rights o'
things more nor other folks have. But I'll niver give in as
that's 'cause she's a Methodist, no more nor a white calf's
white 'cause it eats out o' the same bucket wi' a black un."

" Nay," said Mr. Poyser, with as near an approach to a
snarl as his good-nature would allow ; " I'n no opinion o' the

174

ADAM BEDS.

Methodists, It's on'y tradesfolk's as turn Methodists ; you
never knew a farmer bitten vvi' them maggots. There's may-
be a workman now an' then, as isn't over clever at's work,
takes to preachin' an' that, like Seth Bede. But you see
Adam, as has got one o' the best head-pieces hereabout, knows
better; he's a good Churchman, else I'd never encourage him
for a sweetheart for Hetty."

" Why, goodness me," said Mrs. Poyser, who had looked
back while her husband was speaking, " look where Molly is
with them lads. They're the field's length behind us. How
couI(f yon let 'em do so, Hetty.? Anybody might as well set
a picture to watch the children as you. Run back, and tell
'em to come on."

Mr. and Mrs. Poyser were now at the end of the second
field, so they set Totty on the top of one of the targe stones
forming the true Loamshire stile, and awaiting the loit-
erers ; Totty observing, with complacency, " Dey naughty,
naughty boys — me dood."

The fact was, that this Sunday walk through the fields was
fraught with great excitement to Marty and Tommy, who saw
a perpetual drama going on in the hedgerows, and could no
more refrain from stopping and peeping than if they had been
a couple of spaniels or terriers. Marty was quite sure he saw
a yellowhammer on the boughs of the great ash ; and while
he was peeping, he missed the sight of a white-throated stoat
which had run across the path, and was described with much
fervor by the junior Tommy. Then there was a little green-
finch, just fledged, fluttering along the ground, and it seemed
quite possible to catch it, till it managed to flutter under the
blackberry bush. Hetty could not be got to give any heed to
these things, so Molly was called on for her ready sympathy,
and peeped with open mouth wherever she was told, and said,
" Lawks ! " whenever she was expected to wonder.

Molly hastened on with some alarm when Hetty had come
back and called to them that her aunt was angry ; but Marty
ran on first, shouting, " We've found the speckled turkey's
nest, mother ! " with the instinctive confidence that people
who bring good news are never in fault.

" Ah ! " said Mrs. Poyser, really forgetting all discipline
in this pleasant surprise, " that's a good lad ; why, where is it ? "

" Down in ever such a hole under the hedge. I saw it
first, looking after the greenfinch, and she sat on th' nest."

" You didn't frighten her, I hope," said the mother, *' else
she'll forsake it."

ADAM BEDE. i«

"No, 1 went away as still, as still," and whispered to
Molly, " didn't I, Mol'ly ? "

" Well, well, now come on," said Mrs. Poyser, " and walk
before father and mother, and take your little sister by the
hand. We must go straight on now. Good boys don't look
after the birds of a Sunday."

"But, mother," said Marty, "you said you'd give half a
crown to find the speckled turkey's nest. Mayn't I have the
half crown put into my money-box ? "

" We'll see about that, my lad, if you walk along now, like
a good boy."

The father and mother exchanged a significant glance of
amusement at their eldest-bom's acuteness ; but on Tommy's
round face there was a cloud.

" Mother," he said, half crv'ing, " Marty's got ever so much
more money in his box nor I've got in mine."

" Munny, me want half a toun in my bots," said Tott3\

" Hush, hush, hush," said Mrs. Poyser, " did ever anybody
hear such naughty children ? Nobody shall ever see their
money-boxes any more if they don't make haste and go on to
church."

This dreadful threat had the desired effect, and through
the two remaining fields the three pair of small legs trotted
on without any serious interruption, notwithstanding a small
pond full of tadpoles, alias " bullheads," which the lads looked
at wistfully.

The damp hay that must be scattered and turned afresh
to-morrow was not a cheering sight to Mr. Poyser, who dur-
ing hay and corn harvest had often some mental struggles as
to the benefits of a day of rest ; but no temptation would
have induced him to carry on any field work, however early
in the morning, on a Sunday ; for had not Michael Holds-
worth had a pair of oxen " sweltered " while he was plowing
on Good Friday ? That was demonstration that work on
sacred days was a wicked thing ; and with wickedness of any
sort Martin Poyser was quite clear that he would have noth-
ing to do, since money got by such means would never prosper,

" It a'most makes your fingers itch to be at the hay now
the sun shines so," he observed as they passed through the
" Big Meadow." " But it's poor foolishness to think o' sav-
ing by going against your conscience. There's that Jim
Wakefield, as they used to call ' Gentleman Wakefield,' used
to do the same of a Sunday as o' week days, and took no heed
to right or wrong, as if there was nayther God nor devil. An'

176 ADAM BEDS.

what's he come to ? Why, I saw him myself last market-day
a-carrying a basket \vi' oranges in't."

" Ah ! to be sure," said Mrs. Poyser, emphatically, " you
make but a poor trap to catch luck if you go and bait it by
wickedness. The money as is got so's like to burn holes i'
your pocket. I'd niver wish to leave our lads a sixpence but
what was got i' the rightful way. And as for the weather,
there's One above makes it, and we must put up wi't ; it's
nothing of a plague to what the wenches are."

Notwithstanding the interruption in their walk, the excel-
lent habit which Mrs. Poyser's clock had of taking time by
the forelock, had secured their arrival at the village while it
was still a quarter to two, though almost every one who meant
to go to church was already within the church-yard gates.
Those who staid at home were chiefly mothers, like Timothy's
Bess, who stood at her own door nursing her baby, and feel-
ing as women feel in that position — that nothing else can be
expected of them.

It was not entirely to see Thias Bede's funeral that the
people were standing about the church-yard so long before
the service began ; that was their common practice. The wo-
men, indeed, usually entered the church at once, and the
farmer's wives talked in an undertone to each other, over the
tall pews, about their illnesses, and the total failure of doctors'
stuff, recommending dandelion-tea, and other home-made
specifics as far preferable — about the servants, and their grow-
ing exorbitance as to wages, whereas the quality of their ser-
vice declined from year to year, and there was no girl nowa-
days to be trusted any farther than you could see her — about
the bad price Mr. Dingall, the Treddleston grocer, was giving
for butter, and the reasonable doubts that might be held as
to his solvency, notwithstanding that Mrs. Dingall was a sen-
sible woman, and they were all sorry for her, for she had very
good kin. Meantime the men lingered outside, and hardly
any of them except the singers, who had a humming and frag-
mentary rehearsal to go through, entered the church until Mr.
Irwine was in the desk. They saw no reason for that prema-
ture entrance — what could they do in church, if they were
there before the service began ? — and they did not conceive
that any power in the universe could take it ill if they staid
Dut and talked a little about "bis'ness."

Chad Cranage looks quite a new acquaintance to-day,
for he has got his clean Sunday face, which always makes his
little grand-daughter cry at him as a stranger. But an expe-

ADAM BEDE. ly-

rienced eye would have fixed on him at once as the village
blacksmith, after seeing the humble deference with which the
big, saucy fellow took off his hat and stroked his hair to the
farmers ; for Chad was accustomed to say that a working-man

must hold a candle to a personage understood to be as

black as he was himself on week days ; by which evil-soundino-
rule of conduct he meant what was, after all. rather virtuous
than otherwise, namely, that men who had horses to be shod
must be treated with respect. Chad and the rougher sort of
workmen kept aloof from the grave under the white thorn,
where the burial was going forward ; but Sandy Jim, and sev-
eral of the farm laborers, mad a group round it, and stood
with their hats off, as fellow-monrners with the mother and
sons. Others held a midway position, sometimes watching the
group at the grave, sometimes listening to the conversation of
the farmers who stood in a knot near the church door, and
were now joined by Martin Poyser, while his family passed
into the church. On the outside of this knot stood Mr.
Casson, the landlord of the Donnithorne Arms, in his most
striking attitude — that is to say, with the forefinger of his right
hand thrust between the buttons of his waistcoat, his left hand
in his breeches pocket, and his head very much on one side;
looking, on the whole, like an actor who has only a monosyl-
labic part intrusted to him, but feels sure that the audience
discern his fitness for the leading business ; curiously in con-
trast with old Jonathan Burge, who held his hands behind
him, and leaned forward, coughing asthmatically, with an in-
ward scorn of all knowingness that could not be turned into
cash. The talk was in rather a lower tone than usual to-day,
hushed a little by the sound of Mr. Trwine's voice reading the
final prayers of the burial service. They had all had their
word of pity for poor Thias, but now they had got upon the
nearer^ subject of their own grievances against Satchell, the
Squire's bailiff, who plaved the part of steward, so far as it
was not performed by old Mr. Donnithorne himself, for that
gentleman had the meanness to receive his own rents and make
bargains about his own timber. This subject of conversation
was an additional reason for not being loud, since Satchel
himself might presently be walking up the paved road to the
church door. And soon thev became suddenlv silent ; for
Mr. Irwine's voice had ceased, and the group round the white
thorn was dispersing itself toward the church.

They all moved aside, and stood with their hats ofT, while
Mr. Irwine passed. Adam and Seth were coming next, with

178 ADAM BEDE.

their mother between then ; for Joshua Rann officiated a?
head sexton as well as clerk, and was not yet ready to follow
the rector into the vestry. But there was a pause before the
three mourners came on ; Lisbeth had turned round to look
again toward the grave. Ah ! there was nothing now but the
brown earth under the white thorn. Yet she cried less to-day
than she had done any day since her husband's death ; along
with all her grief there was mixed an unusual sense of her own
importance in having a " burial," and in Mr. Irwine's reading a
special service for her husband ; and besides, she knew the
funeral psalm was going to be sung for him. She felt this
counter-excitement to her sorrow still more strongly as she
walked with her sons toward the church door, and saw the
friendly sympathetic nods of their fellow-parishioners.

The mother and sons passed into the church, and one by
one the loiterers followed, though some still lingered without ;
the sight of Mr. Donnithorne's carriage, which was winding
slowly up the hill, perhaps helping to make them feel that
there was no need for haste.

But presently the sound of the bassoon and the key-bugles
burst forth ; the evening hymn, which always opened the ser-
vice, had begun, and every one must now enter and take his
place.

I cannot say that the interior of Hayslope church was re-
markable for anything except for the gray age of its oaken
pews — great square pews mostly, ranged on each side of a
narrow aisle. It was free, indeed, from the modern blemish of
galleries. The choir had two narrow pews to themselves in
the middle of the right-hand row, so that it was a short process
for Joshua Rann to take his place among them as principal
bass, and return to his desk after the singing was over. The
pulpit and desk, gray and old as the pews, stood on one sjde
of the arch leading into the chancel, which also had its gray
square pews for Mr. Donnithorne's family and servants. Yet
I assure you those gray pews, with the buff-washed walls, gave a
very pleasing tone to this shabby interior, and agreed ex-
tremely well with the ruddy faces and bright waistcoats. And
there were liberal touches of crimson toward the chancel, for
the pulpit and Mr. Donnithorne's own pew had handsome
crimson cloth cushions \ and, to close the vista, there was a
crimson altar-cloth, embroidered with golden rays by Miss
Lvdia's own hand.

But even without the crimson cloth, the effect must have
been warm and cheering when Mr. Irvvine was in the desk,

ADAM BEDE.

179

looking oenignly round on that simple congregation — on the
hardy old men, with bent knees and shoulders perhaps, but
with vigor left for much hedge-clipping and thatching ; on the
tall stalwart frames and roughly-cut bronzed faces of the
stone-cutters and carpenters ; on the half-dozen well-to-do
farmers, with their apple-cheeked families ; and on the clean
old women, mostly farm-laborers' wives, with their bit of snow-
white cap-border under their black bonnets, and with their
withered arms, bare from the elbow, folded passively over
their chests. For none of the old people held books — why
should they ? not one of them could read. Bet they knew a
few " good words " by heart, and their withered lips now and
then moved silently, following the service without any very
clear comprehension indeed, but with a simple faith in its
eflficacy to ward off harm and bring blessing. And now all
faces were visible, for all were standing up — the little children
on the seats, peeping over the edge of the gray pews — while
good old Bishop Ken's evening hymn was being sung to one
of those lively psalm-tunes which died out with the last gen-
eration of rectors and choral parish-clerks. Melodies die out,
like the pipe of Pan, with the ears that love them and listen
for them. Adam was not in his usual place among the
singers to day, for he sat with his mother and Seth, and
he noticed with surprise that Bartle Massey was absent too;
all the more agreeable for Mr. Joshua Rann, who gave out
his bass notes with unusual complacency, and threw an extr?
ray of severity into the glances he sent over his spectacles a/
the recusant Will Maskery.

I beseech you to imagine Mr. Irwine looking round on
this scene, in his ample white surplice that became him so
well, with his powdered hair thrown back, his rich brown
complexion, and his finely-cut nostril and upper lip ; for there
was a certain virtue in that benignant yet keen countenance,
as there is in all human faces from which a generous soul beams
out. And over all streamed the delicious June sunshine
through the old windows, with their desultory patches of
yellow, red, and blue, that threw pleasant touches of color on
the opposite wall.

I think, as Mr. Irwine looked round to-day, his eyes
rested an instant longer than usual on the spare pew occu-
pied by Manin Poyser and his family. And there was an-
other pair of dark eyes that found it impossible not to wander
thither, and rest on that round pink-and-white figure. Bur
Hetty was at that moment quite careless of any glances — she

l8o AVAM BEDS,

was absorbed in the thought that Arthur Donnithorne would
soon be coming into church, for the carriage must surely be
at the church gate by this time. She had never seen him
since she parted with him in the wood on Thursday evening,
and oh ! how long the time had seemed ! Things had gone
on just the same as ever that evening ; the wonders that had
happened then had brought no changes after them ; they
were already like a dream. When she heard the church door
swinging, her heart beat so she dared not look up. She felt
that her aunt was courtesying ! she courtesied herself. That
must be old Mr. Donnithorne — he always came first, the
wrinkled small old man, peering round with short-sighted
glances at the bowing and courtesying congregation ; then
she knew Miss Lydia was passing, and though Hetty liked so
much to look at her fashionable little coal-scuttle bonnet, with
the wreath of small roses round it, she didn't mind it to-day.
But there were no more courtesies — no, he was not come ; she
felt sure there was nothing else passing the pew door but
the housekeeper's black bonnet, .and the lady's-maid's beauti-
ful straw that had once been Miss Lydia's, and then the
powdered heads of the butler and footman. No, he was not
there ; yet she would look now — she might be mistaken — for,
after all, she had not looked. So she lifted up her eyelids
and glanced timidly at the cushioned pew in the chancel ;
there was no one but old Mr. Donnithorne rubbing his
spectacles with his white handkerchief, and Miss Lydia open-
ing the large gilt-edged prayer-book. The chill disappoint-
ment was too hard to bear ; she felt herself turning pale, her lips
trembling ; she was ready to cry. Oh, what should she do .-•
Everybody would know the reason ; they would know she
was crying because Arthur was not there. And Mr. Craig,
with the wonderful hot-house plant in his button-hole, was
staring at her, she knew. It was dreadfully long before the
General Confession began, so that she could kneel down.
Two great drops would i?\\ then, but no one sav/ them except
good-natured Molly, for her aunt and uncle knelt with their
backs toward her. Molly, unable to imagine any cause for tears
in church except faintness, of which she had a vague traditional
knowledge, drew out of her pocket a queer little flat blue
smelling-bottle, and after much labor in pulling the cork out,
thrust the narrow neck against Hetty's nostrils. " It donna
smell," she whispered, thinking this was a great advantage
which old salts had over fresh ones : they did you good with-
out biting your nose. Hetty pushed it away peevishly ; but

ADAM BEDE.

i8i

this little flash of temper did what the salts could not have
done — it roused her to wipe away the traces of her tears, and
try with all her might not to shed any more, Hetty had a
certain strength in her vain little nature ; she would have
borne anything rather than be laughed at, or pointed at with
any other feeling than admiration ; she would have pressed
her own nails into her tender flesh rather than people should
knew a secret she did not want them to know.

What fluctuations there were in her busy thoughts and
feelings, while Mr. Irwin e was pronouncing the solemn
" Absolution " in her deaf ears, and through all the tones of
petition that followed ! Anger lay very close to disappoint-
ment, and soon won the victory over the conjectures her small
ingenuity could devise to account for Arthur's absence on the
supposition that he really wanted to come, really wanted to
see her again. And by the time she rose from her knees
mechanically, because all the rest were rising, the color had
returned to her cheeks even with a heightened glow, for she
was framing little indignant speeches to herself, saying she
hated Arthur for giving her this pain — she would like him to
suffer too. Yet, while this selfish tumult was going on in her
soul, her eyes were bent down on her prayer-book, and the
eyelids with their dark fringe looked as lovely as ever. Adam
Bede thought so as he glanced at her for a moment on rising
from his knees.

But Adam's thoughts of Hetty did not deafen him to the
service ; they rather blended with all the other deep feelings
for which the church service was a channel to him this after-
noon, as a certain consciousness of our entire past and our
imagined future blends itself with all our moments of keen
sensibility. And to Adam the Church service was the best
channel he could have found for his mingled regret, yearning,
and resignation ; its interchange of beseeching cries for help
with outbursts of faith and praise — its recurrent responses and
the familiar rhythm of its collects, seemed to speak for him as
no other form of worship could have done ; as, to those early
Christians who had worshipped from their childhood upward
in catacombs, the torchlight and shadows must have seemed
nearer the Divine presence than the heathenish daylight of
the streets. The secret of our emotions never lies in the bare
object, but in its subtle relations to our own past ; no wonder
the secret escapes the unsympathizing observer, who might as
well put on his spectacles to discern odors.

But there was one reason why even a chance comer would

l82 ADAM BEDE.

have found the service in Hayslope Church more impressive
than in most other village nooks in the kingdom — a reason, of
which I am sure you have not the slightest suspicion. It was
the reading of our friend Joshua Rann. Where that good
shoemaker got his notion of reading from, remained a mystery
even to his most intimate acquaintances. 1 believe, after all,
he got it chiefly from Nature, who had poured some of hei
music into this honest conceited soul, as she had been known
to do into other narrow souls before his. She had given him,
at least, a fine bass voice and a musical ear ; but I cannot
positively say whether these alone had tended to inspire him
with the rich chant in which he delivered the responses. The
way he rolled from a rich deep forte into a melancholy cad-
ence, subsiding, at the end of the last word, into a sort of faint
resonance, like the lingering vibrations of a violoncello, I can
compare to nothing for its strong calm melancholy but the
rush and cadence of the wind among the autumn boughs.
This may seem a strange mode of speaking about the reading
of a parish clerk — a man in rusty spectales, with stubby hair,
a large occiput, and a prominent crown. But that is Nature's
way \ she will allow a gentleman of splendid physiognomy and
poetic aspirations to sing wofully out of tune, and not give
him the slightest hint of it ; and takes care that some narrow-
browed fellow trolling a ballad to the corner of a pot-house,
shall be true to his intervals as a bird.

Joshua himself was less proud of his reading than of his
singing, and it was always with a sense of heightened impor-
tance that he passed from his desk to the choir. Still more
to-day ; it was a special occasion ; for an old man, familiar to
all the parish, had died a sad death — not in his bed, a circum-
stance the most painful to the mind of the peasant — and now
the funeral psalm was to be sung in memory of his sudden de-
parture. Moreover, Bartle Massey was not at church, and
Joshua's importance in the choir suffered no eclipse. It was
a solemn minor strain they sang. The old psalm-tunes have
many a wail among them, and the words,

" Thou sweep' st us off as with a flood ;
We vanish hence like dreams " —

seemed to have a closer application than usual, in the death of
poor Thias. The mother and sons listened, each with pecu-
liar feelings. Lisbeth had a vague belief that the psalm was
doing her husband good ; it was part of that decent burial
which she would have thought it a greater wrong to withhold

ADAM BEDE.

from him than to have caused him many unhappy days while
he was living. The more there was said about her husband,
the more there was done for him, surely the safer he would
be. It was poor Lisbeth's blind way of feeling that human
love and pity are a ground of faith in some other love. Selh,
who was easily touched, shed tears, and tried to recall, as he
had done continually since his father's death, all that he had
heard of the possibility that a single moment of consciousness
at the last might be a moment of pardon and reconcilement ;
for was it not written in the very psalm they were singing,'
that the Divine dealings were not measured and circumscribed
by time ? Adam had never been unable to join in a psalm
before. He had known plenty of trouble and vexation since
he had been a lad; but this was the first sorrow that had
hemmed in his voice, and strangely enough it was sorrow be-
cause the chief source of his past trouble and vexation was
forever gone out of his reach. He had not been able to press
his father's hand before their parting, and say, "Father, you
know it was all right between us ; I never forgot what I owed
you when I was a lad ; you forgive me if I have been too hot
and hasty now and then ! " Adam thought but little to-day
of the hard work and earnings he had spent on his father ;
his thoughts ran constantly on what the old man's feelings
had been in moments of humiliation, when he had held down
his head before the rebukes of his son. When our indigna-
tion is borne in submissive silence, we are apt to feel twinges
of doubt afterward as to our own generosity, if not justice ;
how much more when the object of our anger has gone into
everlasting silence, and we have seen his face for the last time
in the meekness of death ?

•' Ah ! I was always too hard," Adam said to himself,
" It's a sore fault in me as I'm so hot and out o' patience with
people when they do wrong, and my heart gets shut up against
'em, so as I can't bring myself to forgive 'em. I see clear
enough there's more pride nor love in my soul, for I could
sooner make a thousand strokes with th' hammer for my father
than bring myself to say a kind word to him. And there
went plenty o' pride and temper to the strokes, as the devil
will be having his finger in what we call our duties as well as
our sins. Mayhap the best thing I ever done in my life was
only doing what was easiest for myself. It's allays been easier
for me to work nor to sit still, but the real tough job for me
'ud be to master my own will and temper, and go right against
my own pride. It seems to me now. if I was to find father at

1 84 ADAM BEDE

home to-night, I should behave different ; but there's no
knowing — perhaps nothing 'ud be a lesson to us if it didn't
come too late. It's well we should feel as life's a reckoning
we can't make twice over ; there's no real making amends in
this world, any more nor you can mend a wrong subtraction
by doing your addition right,"

This was the key-note to which Adam's thoughts had per-
petually returned since his father's death, and the solemn
wail of the funeral psalm was only an influence that brought
back the old thoughts with stronger emphasis. So was the
sermon which Mr. Irwine had chosen with reference to Thias's
funeral. It spoke briefiy and simply of the words, "In the
midst of life we are in death " — how the present moment is
all we can tell our ov/n for works of mercy, of righteous deal-
ing, and of family tenderness. All very old truths — but what
we thought the oldest truth becomes the most startling to us
in the week when we had looked on the dead face of one who
has made a part of our own lives. For when men want to
impress us with the effect of a new and wonderfully vivid light,
do they not let it fall on the most familiar object, that we may
measure its intensity by remembering the former dimness?

Then came the moment of the final blessing, when the for-
ever sublime words, " The peace of God, which passeth all
understanding," seemed to blend with the calm afternoon
sunshine that fell on the bowed heads of the congregation ;
and then the quiet rising, the mothers tying on the bonnets
of the little maidens who had slept through the sermon, the
fathers collecting the prayer-books, until all streamed out
through the old archway into the green church-yard, and began
their neighborly talk, their simple civilities, and their invita-
tions to tea ; for on a Sunday every one was ready to receive
a guest — it was the day when all must be in their best clothes,
and their best humor,

Mr. and Mrs. Poyser paused a minute at the church gate ;
they were waiting for Adam to come up, not being contented
to go away without saying a kind word to the widow and her
sons.

" Well, Mrs. Bede," said Mrs. Poyser, as they walked on
together, "you must keep up your heart ; husbands and wives
must be content when they've lived to rear their children and
see on another's hair gray."

"Ay, ay," said Mr. Poyser; "they wonna have long to
wait for one another then, anyhow. And ye've got two o' the
strapping'st sons i' the country ; and well you may, for 1 re-

ADAM BEDE. j§

member poor Thias as fine a broad-shouldered fellow as need
to be ; and as for you, Mrs. Bede, why you're straighter i' the
back nor half the young women now.'^'

" Eh ! " said Lisbeth, " it's poor luck for the platter to wear
twell when it's broke i' two. The sooner I'm laid under the
ho rn, the better. I'm no good to nobody now."

Adam never took notice of his mother's little unjust
plamts ; but Seth said, " Nay, mother, thee mustna say so
Thy sons 'ull never get another mother,"
_ ^ "That's true, lad— that's true," said Mr. Povser; '^ and
It's wrong on us to give way to grief, Mrs. Bede, for it's like
the children cryin' when the fathers and mothers take things
from 'em. There's one above knows better nor us."

" Ah ! " said Mrs. Poyser, " an' it's poor work allays set-
tm' the dead above the livin'. We shall all on us be dead
some time, I reckon ; it 'ud be better if folks 'ud make much
on us beforehand i'stid o' beginnin' when we're gone. It's
but little good you'll do a-watering the last year's crop.''

"Well, Adam," said Mr. Poyser, feeling that his wife's
words were, as usual, rather incisive than soothing, and that
It would be well to change the subject, "vou'll come and see
us again now, I hope. I hanna had a talk with vou this long
while and the missis here wants you to see what can be done
with her best spinning-wheel, for it's got broke, and it'll be
a nice job to mend it ; there'll want a bit o' turning. You'll
come as soon as you can, now, will you .? "
_ Mr. Poyser paused and looked round while he was speak-
ing, as if to see where Hetty was. for the children were run-
ning on before. Hetty was not without a companion, and she
had, besides, more pink and white about her than ever • for
she held in her hand the wonderful pink-and-white hot-house
plant, with a ver)^ long name— a Scotch name, she supposed
since people said Mr. Craig the gardener was Scotch. Adam
took the opportunity of looking round too. and I am sure
you will not require of him that he should feel any vexation
in observing a pouting expression on Hettv's face as she lis-
tened to the gardener's small talk. Yet in her secret heart
she was glad to have him by her side, for she would, perhaps,
learn from him how it was Arthur had not come to church
ISot ihatshe cared to ask him the question, but she hoped the
mtormation would be given spontaneouslv ; forMr. Craig like
a superior man, was x^xy fond of giving information.

Mr. Craig was never aware that his conversation and ad-
vances were received coldly, for to shift one's point of view

l86 ADAM BEDS.

beyond certain limits is impossible to the most liberal and ex-
pansive mind : we are none of us aware of the impression we
produce on Brazilian monkeys of feeble understanding ; it is
possible they see hardly anything in us. Moreover, Mr.
Craig was a man of sober passions, and was already in his
tenth year of hesitation as to the relative advantages of mat-
rimony and bachelorhood. It is true that, now and then, when
he had been a little heated by an extra glass of grog, he had
been heard to say of Hetty that the " lass was well enough,"
and that " a man might do worse ; " but on convivial occa-
sions men are apt to express themselves strongly.

Martin Poyser held Mr. Craig in honor as a man who " knew
his business," and who had great lights concerning soils and
compost ; but he was less of a favorite with Mrs. Poyser, who
had more than once said in confidence to her husband, "You're
mighty fond o' Craig ; but for my part, I think he's welly like
a cock as think's the sun's rose o' purpose to hear him crow."
For the rest, Mr. Craig was an estimable gardener, and was
not without reasons for having a high opinion of himself. He
had also high shoulders and high cheek-bones, and hung his
head forward a little as he walked along with his hands in
his breeches pockets. I think it was his pedigree only that
h ad the advantage of being Scotch, and not his " bringing
up ; " for, except that he had a stronger burr in his accent, his
speech differed' little from that of the Loamshire people about
him. But a gardener is Scotch, as a French teacher is Pari-
sian.

" Well, Mr. Poyser," he said, before the good slow farmer
had time to speak, " ye'll not be carrying your hay to-morrow,
Fm thinking; the glass sticks at ' change,' and ye may rely
upo' my word as we'll ha' more downfall afore twenty-four
hours is past. Ye see that darkish-blue cloud there upo' the
'rizon — you know what I mean by the 'rizon, where the land
and sky seems to meet."

" Ay, ay, I see the cloud," said Mr. Poyser, " 'rizon or no
'rizon. It's right o'er Mike Holdsworth's fallow, and a foul
fallow it is."

" Well, you mark my words, as that cloud 'ull spread o'er
the sky pretty nigh as quick as you'd spread a tarpaulin over
one o' your hayricks. It's a great thing to ha' studied the
look o' the clouds. Lord bless you ! the met'orological alma-
necs can learn me nothing, but there's a pretty sight o' things
I could let t/ian up to if they'd just come to me. And how
are you, Mrs. Poyser ? thinkin' o' getherin' the red currants

ADAM BEDE.

187

soon, I reckon. You'd a deal better gether 'em afore they're
o'er ripe wi' such wether as we've got to look forward to.
How do ye do, Mistress Bede t " Mr. Craig continued, witl>
out a pause, nodding, by the way, to Adam and Seth. " I
hope y' enjoyed them spinach and gooseberries as I sent
Chester with th' other day. If ye want vegetables while ye"re
in trouble, ye know where to come to. It's well known I'm
not giving other folks's things away; for when I've supplied
the house, the garden's my own spekilation, and it isna every
man th' old squire could get as "ud be equil to th' undertak-
ing, let alone asking whether he'd be willing. I've got to run
my calkilation fine, I can tell you, to make sure o' getting
back the money as I pay the squire. I should like to see
some o' them fellows as make th" almanecs looking as far be-
fore their noses as I've got to do every year as comes."

" They look pretty fur, though," said Mr. Poyser, turning
his head on one side, and speaking in rather a subdued, rev^
erential tone. "Why, what could come truer nor that pictur
o' the cock wi' the big spurs, as has got its head knocked
down wi' th' anchor, an' the firin', and the ships behind ?
Why, that pictur was made afore Christmas, and yit it's come
as true as th' Bible. Why, th' cock's France, an' th' anchor's
Nelson — an' they told us that beforehand.".

"Pee— ee-eh!" said Mr. Craig. "A man dosena want
to see fur to know as th' English 'ull beat the French. Why,
I know upo' good authority as it's a big Frenchman as reaches
five foot high, an' they live upo' spoon-meat mostly. I knew
a man as his father had a particular knowledge o' the French.
I should like to know what them grasshoppers are to do
against such fine fellows as our young Captain Arthur. Why,
it 'ud astonish a Frenchman only to look at him ; his arm's
thicker nor a Frenchman's body, I'll be bound, for' they pinch
tlieirselvcs in wi' stays ; and it's easy enough, for they've o-ot
nothing i' their insides." ^

"Where is the Captain, as he was'n at church to-day.? "
£aid Adam. " I was talking to him o' Friday, and he said
nothing about his going away."

"Oh, he's only gone to Eagledale for a bito' fishing; I
reckon he'll be back again afore many d-ays are o'er, for he'^s to
beat all th' arranging and preparing o' things for the com.in' o'
age o' the thirtieth o' July. But he's fond o' getting away
for a bit, now and then. Him and th' old squire fit one an-
other like frost and flowers."

Mr. Craig smiled and winked slowly as he made this last

f gg ADAM BEDE.

observation, but the subject was not developed farther, for
now they had reached the turning in the road where Adam
and his companions must say "good-by." The gardener, too,
would have had to turn off in the same direction if he had not
accepted Mr. Poyser's invitation to tea. Mrs. Poyser duly
seconded the invitation, for she would have held it a deep dis-
grace not to make her neighbors welcome to her house ; per-
sonal likes and dislikes must not interfere with that sacred
custom. Moreover, Mr. Craig had always been full of civili-
ties to the family at the Hall Farm, and Mrs. Poyser was
scrupulous in declaring that she had " nothing to say again
him, on'y it was a pity he couldna be hatched o'er again, an
hatched different."

So Adam and Seth, with their mother between them,
wound their way down to the valley and up again to the old
house, where a saddened memory had taken the place of a long,
long anxiety — where Adam would never have to ask again as
he entered, *' Where's father ? "

And the other family party, with Mr. Craig for company,
went back to the pleasant bright house-place at the HalJ
Farm — all with quiet minds, except Hetty, who knew now
where Arthur was gone, but was only the more puzzled and
uneasy. For it appeared that his absence was quite volun-
tary ; he need not have gone — he would not have gone if he
had wanted to see her. She had a sickening sense that no
lot could ever be pleasant to her again if her Thursday night's
vision was not fulfilled ; and in this moment of chill, bare,
wintry disappointment and doubt, she looked toward the
possibility of being with Arthur again, of meeting his loving
glance and hearing his soft words, with that eager yearning
which one may call the " growing pain " of passion.

CHAPTER XIX.

ADAM ON A WORKING-DAY.

Notwithstanding Mr. Craig's prophecy, the dark-blue
cloud dispersed itself without having produced the threaten^
ing consequences. "The weather," as he observed the next
morning — " the weather, you see, 's a ticklish thing, an' a

ADAM BEDE. c

fool 'ull hit on't sometimes when a wise man missP. • fhc-
why the almanacs gets so much credit Ts one o' he„^
chancy things as fools thrive on " '^^^'"

.r. Ia'v """"^^^o^able behavior of the weather hov•°^er
could displease no one else in Hayslope besides Mr Cn
All hands were to be out in the meadows this morPin ' '
Zhlf 'l^^'' ^^^ "^^"^- ^he wives and dauj,e .^ir •
double work in every farmhouse, that the maids m Vhi . ■"-:
their help in tossing the hay ; and when Adam ^L nT. d ' ^
along the lanes, with his basket of tools ove^ Its si ou d.''-
^^.wl)l '^'i°""^ "^ j^^'^^^ ^^^k and ringing lau^l e? :'
behind the hedges. The jocose talk of ha4akers1 bes "'
a distance; like those clumsy bells round the cous' neckr
It has rather a coarse sound when it romp^ H^t! a '
even grate on vour ears painfully" but heard f on ' f^r'off •';

^T::s^!:^:^l^^^-^^ sounds ^^n^;:

not at all like the merriment of birds

under the delicious influence of warmth. The re asm A H;n^

fTthe ^r^sf of° If d '^r 'V''' '"^^ - ^ecar^s^w^;]^
m,lp; y ^ i u^y ^^>' ^^ ^ ^^^^f^-y house about three

miles off, which was being put in repair for the son of a ne di-

whhl/^""?-' '"^'^' ^^^ been busy since early morfng
w th the packing of panels, doors, and chimney-p eces n f
wagon, which was now gone on before him, whle Jonathan
Burge himself had ridden to the spot on ho;seback, to S
Its arrival and direct the workmen.

_ This little walk was a rest to Adam, and he was uncon
sciously under the charm of the moment. It wis suZer"
morning m his heart, and he saw Hettv in the sunshine-a

twe^nThe'der^"; §'-r"^\^'^"^^"^^ ^^'^ ^^at tremWe be
tween the delicate shadows of the leaves. He thou-ht ves-

cS thaTtS: '"' °"^ '^^ ',^"' ^° ^^^ - they camrou of

face surh f ? T' ^ '°"'''' °^ "melancholy kindness in her

ha? she h.'d "^ "°' '""'? ^^^°^""' ^-^d 'me^^ok it as a sign

ellow^ th^f^ ?^ sympathy for his family trouble. Poor

ou?ce bn ho' ' °f "^^^^"^holycame from quite another

wZZL f ^^ ^^ ^° '^"^^^ • ^'e Joo^ at the one little

woman s face we love, as we look at the face of our moth«

190

^uAM BEDE.

earth, and see all sorts of answers to our own yearnings. It
was impossible for Adam not to feel that what had happened
in the last week had brought the prospect of marriage nearer
to him. Hitherto he had felt keenly the danger that some
other man might step in and get possession of Hetty's heart
and hand, while he himself was still in a position that made
him shrink from asking her to accept him. Even if he had
had a strong hope that she was fond of him — and his hope
was far from being strong — he had been too heavily burdened
with other claims to provide a home for himself and Hetty —
a home such as he could expect her to be contented with after
the comfort and plenty of the Farm. Like all strong natures,
Adam had confidence in his ability 'to achieve something in
the future ; he felt sure he should some day, if he lived, be
able to maintain a family and make a good broad path for
himself ; but he had too cool a head not to estimate to the
full the obstacles that were to be overcome. And the time
would be so long ! And there was Hetty, like a bright-cheeked
apple hanging over the orchard wall, in sight of everybody,
and everybody must long for her ! To be cure, if she loved
him very much, she would be content to wait for him ; but did
she love him ? His hopes had never risen so high that he
had dared to ask her. He was clear-sighted enough to be
aware that her uncle and aunt would have looked kindly on
his suit, and indeed without this encouragement he would
never have persevered in going to the Farm ; but it was im-
possible to come to any but fluctuating conclusions about
Hetty's feelings. She was like a kitten, and had the same dis-
tractingly pretty looks, that meant nothing, for everybody that
came near her.

But now he could not help saying to himself that the heav-
iest part of his burden was removed, and that even before
the end of another year his circumstances might be brought
into a shape that would allow him to think of marrying. It
would always be a hard struggle with his mother, he knew ;
she would be jealous of any wife he might choose, and she had
set her mind especially against Hetty — perhaps for no other
reason than that she suspected Hetty to be the woman he had
chosen. It would never do, he feared, for his mother to live
in the same house with him when he was married ; and yet
how hard she would think it if he asked her to leave him !
Yes, there was a great deal of pain to be gone through with
his mother, but it was a case in which he must make her feel
that his will was strong — it would be better for her in the end.

ADAM BEDE.

191

For himself he would have liked that they should all live tO'
gether till Seth was married, and they might have built a bit
themselves to the old house, and made morejroom. He did
not like "to part wi' th' lad ; " they had hardly ever been
separated for more than a day since they were born.

But Adam had no sooner caught his imagination leaping
forward in this way — making arrangements for an uncertain
future — than he checked himself. " A pretty building I'm
making, without either bricks or timber. I'm up in the gar-
ret a'ready, and haven't so much as dug the foundation."
Whenever Adam was strongly convince:' of any proposition,
it took the form of a principle in his mind ; it was knowledge
to be acted on, as much as the knowledge that damp will
cause rust. Perhaps here lay the secret of the hardness he
had accused himself of ; he had too little fellow-feeling with
the weakness that errs in spite of foreseen consequences.
Without this fellow-feeling, how are we to get enough patience
and charity toward our stumbling, fallen companions in the
long and changeful journey ? And there is but one way in
which a strong determined soul can learn it — by getting his
heart-strings bound round the weak and erring, so that he
must share not only the outward consequence of their error,
but their inward suffering. That is a long and hard lesson,
and Adam had at present only learned the alphabet of it in
his father's sudden death, which, by annihilating in an instant
all that had stimulated his indignation, had sent a sudden
rush of thought and memory over what had claimed his pity
and tenderness.

But it was Adam's strength, not its correlative hardness,
that influenced his meditations this morning. He had long
made up his mind that it would be wrong as well as foolish
for him to marry a blooming young girl, so long as he had no
other prospect than that of growing poverty with a growing
family. And his savings had been so constantly drawn upon
(besides the terrible sweep of paying for Seth's substitute in the
militia), that he had not enough money beforehand to furnish
even a small cottage, and keep something in reserve against
a rainy day. He had good hope that he should be " firmet
on his legs " by and by ; but he could not be satisfied with a
vague confidence in his arm and brain ; he must have definite
plans, and set about them at once. The partnership with
Jonathan Burge was not to be thought of at present — there
were things implicitly tacked to it that he could not accept j
but Adam thought that he and Seth might carry on a little

192 ADAM BEDE.

business for themselves in addition to their journeyman's

work, by buying a small stock of superior wood and making
articles of household furniture, for which Adam had no end
of contrivances. Seth might gain more by working at sepa-
rate jobs under Adam's direction tlian by his journeyman's
work, and Adam in his over-hours, could do all the " nice "
work, that required peculiar skill. The money gained in this
way. with the good wages he received as foreman, would soon
enable them to get beforehand with the world, so sparingly as
they would all live now. No sooner had this little plan
shaped itself in his mind than he began to be busy with exact
calculations about the wood to be bought, and the particular
article of furniture that should be undertaken first — a kitchen
cupboard of his contrivance, with such an ingenious arrange-
ment of sliding-doors and bolts, such convenient nooks for
stowing household provender, and such a symmetrical result
to the eye, that every good housewife would be in raptures
with it, and fab through all the gradations of melancholy
longing till her husband promised to buy it for her. Adam
pictured to himself Mrs. Povser examining it with her keen
eye, and trying in vain to find out a deficiency ; and of course,
close to Mrs. Poyser stood Hett)-, and Adam was again be-
guiled from calculations and contrivances into dreams and
hopes. Yes, he would go and see her this evening — it was
so long since he had been at the Hall Farm. He would have
liked to go to the night-school, to see why Bartle Massey had
not been at church yesterday, for he feared his old friend was
ill ] but, unless he could manage both visits, this last must be
put off till to-morrow — the desire to be near Hetty, and to
speak to her again, was too strong.

As he made up his mind to this, he was coming very near
to the end of his walk, within the sound of the hammers at
work on the refitting of the old house. The sound of tools to
a clever workman who loves his work, is like the tentative
sounds of the orchestra to the violinist who has to bear his
part in the overture ; the strong fibres begin their accustomed
thrill, and what was a moment before jo}^ vexation, or ambi-
tion, begins its change into energy. All passion becomes
strength when it has an outlet from the narrow limits of our
personal lot in the labor of our right arm, the cunning of our
right han'i, or the still, creative activity of our thought. Look
at Adam through the rest of the day, as he stands on the
scaffolding with the two-feet ruler in his hand, whistling low
while he considers how a difficulty about a floor-joist or a

ADAM BEDE. lo,

window-fra/he is to be overcome ; or as he pushes one of the
younger workmen aside, and takes his place in upheavincr a
weight of timber, saying, " Let alone, lad ! thee'st got too
much gristle i' thy bones yet ; " or as he fixes his keen black
eyes on the motions of a workmen on the other side of the room,
and warns him that his distances are not right. Look at this
broad-shouldered man with the bare muscular arms, and the
thick, firm black hair tossed about like trodden meadow-grass
whenever he takes off his paper cap, and with the strong
baritone voice bursting every now and then into loud and
solemn psalm-tunes, as if seeking some outlet for super-
fluous strength, yet presently checking himself, apparently
crossed with some thought which jars with the singing. Per-
haps, if you had not been already in the secret, you might not
have guessed what sad memories, what warm affection, what
tender fluttering hopes, had their home in this athletic body
with the broken finger-nails— in this rough man, who knew no
better lyrics then he could find in the Old and New Version
and an occasional hymn ; who knew the smallest possible
amount of profane history ; and for whom the motion and
shape of the earth, the course of the sun, and the changes of
the seasons, lay in the region of mystery just made visible by
fragmentary knowledge. It has cost Adam a great deal of
trouble, and work in over-hours, to know what he knew over
and above the secrets of his handicraft, and that acquaintance
with mechanics and figures, and the nature of the materials
he worked with, which was made easy to him by inborn in-
herited faculty— to get the mastery of his pen, and write a
plain hand, to spell without any other mistakes than must in
tairness be attributed to the unreasonable character of ortho-
graphy rather than to any deficiency in the speller, and, more-
over, to learn his musical notes and part-singing. Besides al)
this, he had read his Bible, including the apocryphal books :
n M?!^^^''''^ Almanac," Taylor's "Holy Living and
u ^"f ..7^f Pilgrim's Progress," with Bunyan's Life and
Holy War, a great deal of Bailey's Dictionary, " Valentine
and Orson,' and part of a "History of Babylon" which
iJartie Massey had lent him. He might have had many more
books from Bartle Massey, but he had no time for reading
the common print," as Lisbeth called it, so busy as he was
with figures in all the leisure moments which he did not fill
up with extra carpentry.

Adam, you perceive, was by no means a marvellous man,
nor, properly speaking, a genius, yet I will not pretend that

1 54 ADAM BEDB.

his wasS an ordinary character among workmen ; and it would
not be at all a safe conclusion that the next best man you may
happen to see with a basket of tools over his shoulder and k
paper cap on his head has the strong conscience and the
strong sense, the blended susceptibility and self-command of
our friend Adam. He was not an average man. Yet such
men as he are reared here and there in every generation of
our peasant artisans — with an inheritance of affections nur-
tured bv a simple family life of common need and common in-
dustry, and an inheritance of faculties trained in skilful, cour-
ageous labor ; they make their way upward, rarely as geniuses,
most commonly as painstaking, honest men, with the skill and
conscience to do well the tasks that lie before them. Their
aves have no discernible echo beyond the Neighborhood where
they dwelt, but you are almost sure to find there some good
piece of road, some building, some application of mineral pro-
duce, some improvement in farming practice, some reform of
parish abuses, with which their names are associated by one
or two generations after them. Their employers were the
richer for them, the work of their hands has worn well, and
the work of their brains has guided well the hands of other
men. They went about in their youth in flannel or paper caps,
in coats black with coal dust or streaked with lime and red
paint ; in old age their white hairs are seen in a place of
honor at church and at market, and they tell their well-dressed
sons and daughters seated round the bright hearth on winter
evenings, how pleased they were when they first earned their
Cwopence a day. Others there are who die poor, and never
put ofT the workman's coat on week-days ; they have not had
the art of getting rich ; but they are men of trust, and when
they die before the work is all out of them, it is as if some
main screw had got loose in a machine ; the master who em-
ployed them says : " Where shall I find their like ? "

CHAPTER XX.

ADAM VISITS THE HALL FARM.

Adam came back from his work in the empty wagon ; that
was why he had changed his clothes, and was ready to set out
to the Hall Farm when it still wanted a quarter to seven.

AS AM BEDS-

»9S

"What's thee got thy Sunday cloose on for ? " said Lis-

beth, complainingly, as he came down stairs, " Thee artna
goin' to th' school i' thy best coat ? "

'* No, mother," said Adam, quietly. "I'm going to the
Hall Farm, but maybe I may go to the school after, so thee
mustna wonder if I'm a bit late. Seth 'ull be at home in half
an hour — he's only gone to the village, so thee wotna mind."

" Eh ! an' what's thee got thy best cloose on for to go th'
Hall Farm } The Poyser folks see'd thee in 'em yesterday, I
warrand. What dost mean by turnin' worki'day into Sunday
a-that'n 1 It's poor keepin' company wi' folks as donna like
to see thee i' thy workin' jacket."

" Good-by, mother, I can't stay," said Adam putting on
his hat and going out.

But he had no sooner gone a few paces beyond the door
than Lisbeth became uneasy at the thought that she had vexed
him. Of course, the secret of her objection to the best clothes
was her suspicion that they were put on for Hetty's sake ; but
deeper than all her peevishness lay the need that her son
should love her. She hurried after him, and laid hold of his
arm before he had got half way down to the brook, and said,
'• Nay, my lad thee wotna go away angered wi' thy mother,
an' her got nought to do but to sit by hersen an' think on
thee ? "

" Nay, nay, mother," said Adam, gravely, and standing
still while he put his arm on her shoulder, " I'm not angered ;
but I wish, for thy own sake, thee'dst be more contented to let
me do what I've made up my mind to do. I'll never be no
other than a good son to thee as long as we live. But a man
has other feelings besides what he owes to's father and mother,
and thee oughtna to want to rule over me body and souU And
thee must make up thy mind, as I'll not give way tc thee
where I've a right to do what 1 like. So let us have no more
words about it."

" Eh ! " said Lisbeth, not willing to show that he felt
the real bearing of Adam's words. " an' who likes to s e thee
i' thy best cloose better nor thy mother ? An when thee'st
got thy face washed as clean as the smooth white pibble, an'
thy hair combed so nice, an' thy eyes a-sparkim ' — what else
is there as thy old mother should like to look at half so well }
An' thee sha't put on thy Sunday cioose when thee lik'st for
me — I'll ne'er plague thee no moor aboutn."

" Well, well ; good-by, mother," said Adam, kissing her,
and hurrying away. He saw there was no other means of

196 ADAM BEDE.

putting an end to the dialogue, Lisbeth stood still on the
spot, shading her eyes and looking after him till he was quite
out of sight. She felt* to the full all the meaning that had
Iain in Adam's words, and, as she lost sight of him and
turned back slowly into the house, she said aloud to herself
— for it was her way to speak her thoughts aloud in the long
days, when her husband and sons were at their work — " Eh !
he'll be tellin' me as he's goin'to bring her home one o' these
days ; an' she'll be missis o'er me, an' I mun look on, belike,
while she uses the blue-edged platters, an' breaks "em, may-
hap, though there's ne'er been one broke sin' my old man an'
me bought 'em at the fair twenty 'ear come next Whissuntide.
Eh ! " she went on, still louder, as she caught up her knitting
from the table, " but she'll ne'er knit the lads' stockin's, nor
foot 'em nayther, while I live ; an' when I'm gone, he'll be-
think him as nobody 'ull ne'er fit's leg and foot as his old
mother did. She'll know nothin' o' narrowin' an' heeling', I
warrand, an' she'll make a long toe as he canna get's boot
on. That's what comes o' marr'in' young wenches. I war
gone thirty, an' th' feyther too, afore we war married, an'
young enough too. She'll be a poor dratchell by then she's
thirty, a'marr'in' a-that'n, afore her teeth's all come."

Adam walked so fast that he was at the yard gate before
seven. Martin Poyser and the grandfather were not yet come
in from the meadow ; every one was in the meadow, even to
the black-and-tan terrier ; no one kept watch in the yard but
the bull-dog ; and when Adam reached the house door, which
stood wide open, he saw there was no one in the bright clean
house-place. But he guessed where Mrs. Poyser and some
one else Vi^ould be quite within hearing ; so he knocked on
the door and said, with his strong voice, " Mrs. Poyser
within ?"

" Come in, Mr. Bede, come in," Mrs. Poyser called out
from the dairy. She always gave Adam this title when she
received him in her own house. "You may come into the
dairy if you will, for I canna justly leave the cheese."

Adam walked into the dairy, where Mrs. Poyser and
Nancy were crushing the first evening cheese.

■' Why, you might think you war come to a dead house,"
said Mrs. Posyer, as he stood in the open doorway ; " they're
all i' the meadow ; but Martin's sure to be in afore long, for
they're leaving the hay cocked to night, ready for carrying
first thing to-morrow. I've been forced to have Nancy in,
upo' 'count as Hetty must gather the red currants to-night;

A DA. 12 bEDE. igy

the fruit allays ripens so contrairy, just when ivery hand's
wanted. An' there's no trustin' the' children to gether it, for
they put more into their own mouths nor into the basket;
you might as well set the wasps to gether the fruit."

Adam longed to say he would go into the garden till Mr.
Poyser came in, but he was not quite courageous enough, so
he said, " I could be looking at your spinning-wheel, then,
and see what wants doing to it. Perhaps it stands in the
house, where I can find it } "

"No, I've put it away in the right hand parlor ; but let it
be till I can fetch it an' show it you. I'd be glad now if
you'd go into the garden, and tell Hetty to send Totty in.
The child 'uU run if she's told, and I know Hetty's lettin'
her eat too many currans. I'll be much obliged to you, Mr.
Bede, if you'll go an' send her in ; and there's the York an'
Lankester roses beautiful in the garden now — you'll like to
see 'em. But you'd like a drink o' whey first, p'r'aps ; I
know you're fond o' whey, as most folks is when they hanna
got to crush it out."

"Thank you, Mrs. Poyser," said Adam; "a drink o'
whey's allays a treat to me, I'd rather have it than beer any
day." ^

" Ay, ay," said Mrs. Poyser, reaching a small white basin
that stood on the shelf, and dipping it into the whey-tub,
" the smell o' bread's sweet t'every body but the baker. The
Miss Irwines allays say, 'Oh, Mrs. Poyser, I envy you vour
dairy ; and I envy you your chickens ; and what a beautiful
thing a farm-house is, to be sure ! ' An' I sav, ' Yis ; a farm-
house is a fine thing for them as look on, an'' don't know the
liftin', an' the stannin', an' the worritin' o' the inside as be-
longs to't.' "

" Why, Mrs. Poyser, you wouldn't like to live any place
else but in a farm-house, so well as you manage it," said
Adam, taking the basin ; "and there can be nothing to look
at pleasanter nor a fine milch cow, standing up to its knees
in pasture, and the new milk frothing in the pail, and the
fresh butter ready for market, and the calves and the poultry.
Here's to your health, and may you allers have strength to
look after your own dairy, and set a pattern t' all the farmers'
wives in the country."

Mrs. Poyser was not to be caught in the weakness of
smiling at a compliment, but a quiet complacency overspread
her face like a stealing sunbeam, and gave a milder glance
than usual to her blue-gray eyes, as she looked at Adam

198 ADAM BEDE.

drinking the whey. Ah ! I think I taste that whey now —
with a flavor so delicate that one can hardly distinguish it
from an odor, and with that soft gliding warmth that fills
one's imagination with a still happy dreaminess. And the
light music of the dropping whey is in my ears, mingling with
the twittering of a bird outside the wire net-work window —
the window overlooking the garden, and shaded by tall
gueldre roses.

"Have a little more, Mr. Bede?" said Mrs. Poyser, as
Adam set down the basin.

" No, thank you ; I'll go into the garden now, and send
in the little lass,"

" Ay, do ; and tell her to come to her mother in the dairy."

Adam walked round by the rick-yard, at present empty of
ricks, to the little wooden gate leading into the garden — once
the well-tended kitchen-garden of a manor-house ; now, but
for the handsome brick wall with stone coping that ran along
one side of it, a true farm-house garden, with hardy perennial
flowers, unpruned fruit-trees, and kitchen vegetables growing
together in careless, half-neglected abundance. In that leaf}',
flowery, bushy time, to look for any one in this garden was
like playing at " hide and seek." There was the tall holly-
hocks beginning to flower, and dazzle the eye with their pink,
white, and yellow ; there were the syringas and gueldre roses,
all large and disorderly for want of trimming; there were
leafy walls of scarlet beans and late peas ; there was a row
of bushy filberts in one direction, and in another a huge apple-
tree making a barren circle under its low-spreading boughs.
But what signified a barren patch or two? The garden was
so large. There was always a superfluity of broad beans — it
took nine to ten of Adam's strides to get to the end of the
jincut grass walk that ran by the side of them ; and as for
other vegetables, there was so much more room than was
necessary for them, that in the rotation of crops a large
flourishing bed of groundsel was of yearly occurrence on
one spot or other. The very rose-trees, at which Adam
stopped to pluck one, looked as if they grew wild ; they
were all huddled to;j;ether in bushy masses, now flaunting
with wide open petals, almost all of them of the streaked
pink and white kind, which doubtless dated from the union
of the houses of York and Lancaster. Adam was wise
enough to choose a compact Provence rose that peeped out
half-smothered by its flaunting, scentless neighbors, and held
it in his hand — he thought he should be more at ease holding

ADAM BEDE.

199

something in his hand — as he walked on to the far end of the
garden, where he remembered there was the largest row of
current-trees, not far off from the great yew-tree arbor.

But he had not gone many steps beyond the roses, when
he heard the shaking of a bough, and a boy's voice, saying,

" Now, then, Totty, hold out your pinny — there's a duck."

The voice came from the boughs of a tall cherry-tree, where
Adam had no difficulty in discerning a small, blue-pinafored
figure perched in a commodious position where the fruit was
thickest. Doubtless Totty was below, behind the screen of
peas. Yes — with her bonnet hanging down her back, and hei
fat face, dreadfully smeared with red juice, turned up toward
the cherry-tree, while she held her little round hole of a mouth
and her red-stained pinafore to receive the promised downfall.
I am sorry to say, more than half the cherries that fell were
hard and yellow instead of juicy and red ; but Totty spent no
time in useless regrets, and she was already sucking the third
juciest when Adam said, " There now. Totty, you've got your
cherries. Run in the house with 'em to mother — she wants
you — she's in the dairy. Run in this minute — there's a good
little girl."

He lifted her up in his strong ajms and kissed her as he
spoke, a ceremony which Totty regarded as a tiresome inter-
ruption to cherry-eating ; and when he set her down she trot-
ted off quite silently toward the house, sucking her cherries
as she went along.

" Tommy, my lad, take care you're not shot iox a little
thieving bird," said Adam, as he walked on toward the cur-
rant-trees.

He could see there was a large basket at the end of the
row ; Hetty would not be far off, and Adam already felt as if
she were looking at him. Yet when he turned the corner she
was standing with her back toward him, and stooping to gather
the low-hanging fruit. Strange that she had not heard him
coming ! perhaps it was because she was making the leaves
rustle. She started when she became conscious that some
one was near — started so violently that she dropped the basin
with the currants in it, and then when she saw that it was
Adam, she turned from pale to red. That blush made his
heart beat with a new happiness. Hetty had never blushed
at seeing him before.

"I frightened you," he said, with a delicious sense that it
didn't signify what he said, since Hetty seemed to feel as •
much as he did ; " let me pick the currants up,"

200 ADAM BEDE.

That was soon done, for they had only fallen in a tangled
mass on the grass-plot, and Adam, as he rose and ga\e her
the basin again, looked straight into her eyes with the sub-
dued tenderness tnat belongs to the first moments of hopeful
love.

Hetty did not turn away her eyes ; her blush had subsided,
and she met his glance with a quiet sadness, which contented
Adam because it was so unlike anything he had seen in her
before.

" There's not many more currants to get," she said ; " I
shall soon ha' done now.''

" I'll help you," said Adam, and he fetched the large
basket, which was nearly full of currants, and set it close to
them.

Not a word more was spoken as they gathered the cur-
rants. Adam's heart was too fuJl to speak, and he thought
Hetty knew all that was in it. She was not indifferent to his
presence after all ; she had blushed when she saw him, and
then there was that touch of sadness about her which must
surely mean love, since it was the opposite of her usual man-
ner, which had often impressed him as indifference. And he
could glance at her continually as she bent over the fruit,
while the level evening sunbeams stole through the thick ap-
ple-tree boughs and rested on her round cheek and neck as if
they two were in love with her. It was to Adam the time that
a man can least forget in after-life — the time when he believes
that the first woman he has ever loved betrays by a slight
something, a word, a tone, a glance, the quivering of a lip or
an eyelid, that she is at least beginning to love him in return.
The sign is so slight it is scarcely perceptible to the ear or
eye — he could describe it to no one — it is a mere feather-
touch, yet it seems to have changed his whole being, to have
merged an uneasy yearning into a delicious unconsciousness
of everything but the present moment. So much of our early
gladness vanishes utterly from our memory : we can never
recall the joy with which we laid our heads on our mother's
bosom or rode on our father's back in childhood ; doubtless
that joy is wrought up into our nature, or as the sunlight of
long-past mornings is wrought up into the soft mellowness of
the apricot ; but it is gone forever from our imagination, and
we can only believe in the joys of childhood. But the first
glad moments in our first love is a vision which returns to us
to the last, and brings with it a thrill of feeling intense and
special as the recurrent sensation of a sweet odor breathed

ADAM BEDE. 20,

in a far-off hour of happiness. It is a memory that gives a
more exquisite touch to tenderness, that feeds the madness
of jealousy, and adds the last keenness to the agony of de-
spair.

Hetty bending over the red bushes, the level rays piercing
the screen of apple-tree boughs, the length of bushy garden
beyond, his own emotions as he looked at her and believed
that she was thinking of him, and that there was no need for
them to talk — Adam remembered it all to the last moment of
his life.

And Hetty.? You know quite well that Adam was mis-
taken about her. Like many another man, he thought the
signs of love for another were signs of love toward himself.
When Adam was approaching unseen by her, she was absorbed
as usual in thinking and wondering about Arthur's possible
return ; the sound of any man's footstep would have affected
her just in the same way— she would have felt it might be
Arthur before she had time to see, and the blood that forsook
her cheek in the agitation of that momentary feeling would
have rushed back again at the sight of any one else just as
much as at the sight of Adam. He was not wrong in think'
ing that a change had come over Hetty ; the anxieties and
fears of a first passion, with which she was trembling, had be-
come stronger than vanity, had given her for the first time
that sense of helpless dependence on another's feelings which
awakens the clinging deprecating womanhood even in the
shallowest girl that can ever experience it, and creates in her
a sensibility to kindness which found her quite hard before.
For the first time Hetty felt there was something soothing to
her in Adam's timid yet manly tenderness ; she wanted to be
treated lovingly— Oh, it was very hard to bear this blank of
absence, silence, apparent indifference, after those moments
of glowing love ! She was not afraid that Adam would tease
her with love-making and flattering speeches like her other
adiu'rers ; he had always been so reserved to her; she could
enjoy without any fear the sense that this strong brave man
loved her, and was near her. It never entered into her mind
that Adam was pitiable too— that Adam, too, must suffer one
day.

Hetty, we know, was not the first woman that had behaved
more gently to the man who loved her in vain, because she
had herself begun to love another. It was a verv old story ;
bur Adam knew nothing about it, so he drank in the sweet
delusion.

202 ADAM BEDE.

" That'll do," said Hetty, after a little vyhile. " Aunt wants
me to leave some on the trees. I'll take em in now,"

" It's very well I came to carry the basket," said Adam,
*' for it 'ud ha' been too heavy for your little arms."

" No : I could ha' carried it with both hands."

" Oh, I dare say," said Adam smiling, " and been as lOng
getting into the house as a little ant carrying a caterpillar.
Have you ever seen those tiny fellows carrying things four
times as big as themselves t "

" No," said Hetty indififerently, not caring to know the
difficulties of ant-life..

" Oh, I used to watch 'em often when I was a lad. But
now, you see, I can carry the basket with one arm, as if it was
an empty nutshell, and give you th' other arm to lean on.
Won't you ? Such big arms as mine were made for little arms
like yours to lean on."

Hetty smiled faintly, and put her arm within his. Adam
looked down at her, but her eyes were turned dreamily toward
another corner of the garden,

" Have you ever been to Eagledale ? " she said, as they
walked slowly along.

" Yes," said Adam, pleased to have her ask a question
about himself ; " ten years ago, when I was a lad, I went with
father to see about some work there. It's a wonderful sight
— rocks and caves such as you never saw in your life. I never
had a right notion o' rocks till I went there."
" How long did it take to get there ? "

" Why, it took us the best part o' two days' walking ; but
it's nothing of a day's journey for anybody as has got a first-
rate nag. The captain 'ud get there in nine or ten hours, I'll
be bound, he's such a rider. And I shouldn't wonder if he's
back again to-morrow ; he's too active to rest long in that
lonely place, all by himself, for there's nothing but a bit of a
inn i' that part where he's gone to fish. I wish he'd got th'
estate in his hands ; that 'ud be the right thing for him, for it
'ud give him plenty to do, and he d do't well too, for all he's
so young ; he's got better notions o' things that many a man
twice his age. He spoke very handsome to me th' other day
about lending me money to set up i' business ; and, if things
come round that way; I'd rather be beholding to him nor to
any man i' the world."

Poor Adam was led on to speak about Arthur because he
thought Hetty would be pleased to know that the young squire
was so ready to befriend him ; the fact entered into his future

ADAM BEDE. 203

prospects, which he would like to seem promising in her eyes.
And it was true that Hetty listened with an interest which
brought a new light into her eyes and a half smile upon her
lips.

" How pretty the roses are now ! " Adam continued, paus-
ing to look at them. " See ! I stole the prettiest, but I didna
mean to keep it myself. I think as these are all pink, and
have got a finer sort o' green leaves, are prettier than the
striped 'uns, don't you ? "

He set down the basket, and took the rose from his button-
hole.

" It smells very sweet," he said ; " those striped "uns iiave
no smell. Stick it in your frock, and then vou can put it in
water after. It 'ud be a pity to let it fade."^

Hetty took the rose, smiling as she did so at the pleasant
thought that Arthur could so soon get back if he liked. There
was a flash of hope and happiness in her mind, and, with r
sudden impulse of gayety, she did what she had very often
done before— stuck the rose in her hair a little above the lefl
ear. The tender admiration in Adam's face was slightly
shadowed by reluctant disapproval. Hettv's love of filiery
was just the thing that would most provoke his mother, and
he himself disliked it as much as it was possible for him to dis^
like anything that belonged to her.

"Ah ! •' he said, " that's like the ladies in the pictures at
the Chase ; they've mostly got flowers, or gold things i' their
hair, but somehow I don't like to see 'em ; they allays put me
1 mind o' the painted woman outside the shows at Tred-
dles on fair. What can a woman have to set her off better
than her own hair, when it curls so. like vours .? If a woman's
young and pretty, I think you can see her good looks all the
better for her being plain dressed. Whv. Dinah Morris looks
very nice, for all she wears such a plain cap and gown. It
seems to me as a woman's face doesna want flowers ; it's al-
most like a flower itself. I'm sure yours is."
_ " Oh. very well." said Hettv, with a little playful pout tak-
mg the rose out of her hair. " I'll put one o' Dinah's caps on
when we go m, and you'll see if I look better in it. She left
one behind, so I can take the pattern."

"Nay, nay, I don't want you to wear a Methodist cap like
Uinah s. I dare say it's a very ugly cap. and I used to think
^vhen I^saw her here, as it was nonsense for her to dress dif-
terent t' other people ; but I never ris^htly noticed her till she
came to see mother last week, and then I thought the cap

204 ADA.U BEDE.

seemed to fit her face somehow as th' acorn-cup fits th' acorn,
and I shouldn't like to see her so well without it, But you've
got another sort o' face; I'd have you just as you are now,
without anything t' interfere with your own looks. It's like
when a man's singing a good tune, you don't want t' hear bells
tinkling and interfering wi' the sound."

He took her arm and put it within his again, looking down
on her fondly, He was afraid she should think he had lec-
tured her, imagining, as we are apt to do, that she had per-
ceived all the thoughts he had only half expressed. And the
thing he dreaded most was lest any cloud should come over
this evening's happiness. For the world he would not have
spoken of his love to Hetty yet, till this commencing kindness
towards him should have grown into unmistakable love. In
his imagination he saw long years of his future life stretching
before him, blessed with the right to call Hetty his own ; he
could be content with very little at present. So he took up
the basket of currants once more, and they went on toward the
house.

The scene had quite changed in the half hour that Adam
had been in the garden. The yard was full of life now ; Marty
was letting the screaming geese through the gate, and wick-
edly provoking the gander by hissing at him ; the granary door
was groaning on its hinges, as Alick shut it, after dealing out
the corn ; the horses were being let out to watering, amid much
barking of all the three dogs, and many " whups " from Tim
the ploughman, as if the heavy animals who held down their
meek, intelligent heads, and lifted their shaggy feet so deliber-
ately, were likely to rush wildly in every direction but the
right. Everybody was come back from the meadow ; and
when Hetty and Adam entered the house-place, Mr. Poyser
was seated in the three-cornered chair, and the grandfather in
the large arm-chair opposite, looking on with pleasant expecta-
tion while the supper was being laid on the oak table. Mrs.
Poyser had laid the cloth herself — a cloth made of homespun
linen, with a shining checkered pattern on it, and of an agree-
able whity-brown hue, such as all sensible housewives liked
to see — none of your bleached " shop-rag " that would wear
into holes in no time, but good homespun that would last for
two generations. The cold veal, the fresh lettuces, and the
stuffed chine, might well look tempting to hungry men who
had dined at half-past twelve o'clock. On the large deal table
against the wall there were bright pewter plates and spoons
and cans, ready for Alick and his companions ; for the master

ADAM BEDS.

205

and servants ate their supper not far off each other, which
was all the pleasanter, because if a remark about to-morrow
morning's worlc occurred to Mr. Poyser, Alick was at hand to
hear it.

" Well, Adam, I'm glad to see ye," said Mr. Poyser.
" What, ye've been helping Hetty to gether the currans, eh .?
Come, sit ye down, sit ye down. Why, it's pretty near a three-
week since y' had your supper wi' us ; and the missis has got
one of her rare stuffed chines. I'm glad ye're come."

" Hetty," said Mrs. Poyser, as she looked into the basket
of currants to see if the fruit was fine, " run up stairs, and
send Molly down. She's putting Totty to bed, and I want
her to draw th' ale, for Nancy's busy yet i' the dairy. You
can see to the child. But whativer did }'ou let her run away
from you along wi' Tommy for, and stuff herself wi' fruit as
sh can't eat a bit o' good victual .-' "

This was said in a lower tone than usual, while her husband
was talking to Adam ; for Mrs. Poyser was strict in adherence
to her own rules of propriety, and she considered that a young
girl was not to be treated sharply in the presence of a respect-
able man who was courting her. That would not be fair play ;
every woman was young in her turn, and had her chances of
matrimony, which it was a point of honor for other women
not to spoil — just as one market-woman who has sold her own
eggs must not try to balk another of a customer.

Hetty made haste to run away up stairs, not easily finding
an answer to her aunt's question, and Mrs. Poyser went out
to see after Marty and Tommy, and bring them in to supper.

Soon they were all seated — the two rosy lads, one on each
side, by the pale mother, a place being left for Hetty between
Adam and her uncle. Alick too was come in, and was seated
in his far corner, eating cold broad beans out of a large dish
with his pocket-knife, and finding a flavor in them which he
would not have exchanged for the finest pine-apples.

What a time that gell is drawing th' ale, to be sure," said
Mrs. Poyser, when she was dispensing her slices of stuffed
chinCo " I think she sets the jug under and forgets to turn
the tap, as there's nothing you can't believe o' them wenches ;
they'll set th' empty kettle o' the fire, and then come an hour
after to see if the water boils."

" She's drawin' for the men too," said Mr. Poyser. " Thee
shouldst ha told her to bring our jug up first."

" Tola her ? " said Mrs. Poyser ; " yis, I might spend all
the wind i' my body, an' take the bellows too, if I was to tell

2o6 ADAM BEDE.

them gells everything as their own sharpness wonna tell' em.
Mr. Becle, will you take some vinegar with your lettuce ? Ay,
you re i' the right not. It spoils the flavor o' the chine, to my
thinking. It's poor eating where the flavor o' the meat lies
i' the cruets. There's folks as make bad butter, and trusten
to the salt t' hide it."

Mrs. Poyser's attention was here diverted by the appear-
ance of Molly, carrying a large jug, two small mugs, and four
drinking-cans, all full of ale or small beer — an interesting
example of the prehensile power possessed by the human
hand. Poor Molly's mouth was rather wider open than usual,
as she walked along with her eyes fixed on the double cluster
of vessels in her hands, quite innocent of the expression in
her mistress's eve.

" Molly, I n'iver knew your equils — to think o' your poor
mother as is a widow, an' I took you wi' as good a no charac-
ter, an' the times an' times I've told you "....•

Molly had not seen the lightning, and the thunder shook
her nerves the more for the want of that preparation. With
a vague, alarmed sense that she must somehow comport her-
self differently, she hastened her step a little toward the far
deal-table, where she might set down her cans — caught_ her
foot in her apron, which had become untied, and fell with a
crash and a splash into a pool of beer ; whereupon a tittering
explosion from Marty and Tommy, and a serious " Ello I "
from Mr. Poyser, who saw his draught of ale unpleasantly
deferred.

" There you go ! " resumed Mrs. Poyser, in a cutting tone,
as she rose and went toward the cupboard, while Molly began
dolefully to pick up the fragments of pottery. " It's what I
told vou 'ud come, over and over again ; and there's your
month's wage gone, an' more, to pay for that jug as I've had
i' the house this ten year, and nothing ever happened to't
before ; but the crockery you've broke sin' here in th' house
you've been 'ud make a parson swear — God forgi' me for
saying so ; an' if it had been boiling wort out o' the copper,
it 'ud ha' been the same, and you'd ha' been scalded and very
like lamed for life, as there's no knowing but what you will
be some day, if you go on ; for anybody 'ud think you'd got
the St. Vitus's Dance, to see the things you've throwed down.
It's a pitv but what the bits was stacked up for you to see,
though it's neither seeiu'ir nor hearing as 'ull make much odds
to you — anybody 'ud think you war case-hardened."

Poor Molly's tears were dropping fast by this time, and in

ADAM BEDS 207

her desperation at the lively movement of the beer-stream tow-
ard Alick's legs, she was converting her apron into a mop,
while Mrs. Poyser, opening the cupboard, turned a blighting
eye upon her.

" Ah ! " she went on, "you'll do no good wi' crying an'
making more wet to wipe up. It's all your own wilfulness, as I
tell you, for there's nobody no call to break anything if they'll
only go the right way to work. But wooden fofks would
need ha' wooden things t' handle. And here must I take the
brown-and-white jug, as it's never been used three times this
year, and go down i' the cellar myself, and belike catch my
death, and be laid up with inflammation."

Mrs. Poyser had turned round from the cupboard with the
brown-and-white jug in her hand, when she caught sight of
something at the other end of the kitchen ; perhaps it was be-
cause she was already trembling and nervous that the appari-
tion had so strong an effect on her ; perhaps jug-breaking,
like other crimes, has a contagious influence. However it was,
she stared and stared like a ghost-seer, and the precious
brown-and-white jug fell to the ground, parting forever whh
its spout and handle.

" Did ever anybody see the like .? " she said, with a
suddenly lowered tone, after a moment's bewildered glance
round the room. " The jugs are bewitched, / think. It's
them nasty glazed handles— they slip o'er the finger like a
snail."

" Why, thee'st let thy own whip fly i' thy face," said her hus-
band, who had now joined in the laugh of th@ young ones.

"It's all very fine to look on and grin," rejoined Mrs.
Poj^ser : " but there's times when the cockery seems alive, an'
flies out o' your hand like a bird. It's like the glass, some-
times, 'uU crack as it stands. What is to be broke will be
broke, for I never dropped a thing i' my life for want o' hold-
ing it, else I should never ha' kept the crockery all these 'ears
as I bought at my own wedding. And, Hetty, are you mad ?
Whativer do you mean by coming down i' that way, and
making one think as there's a ghost a-walking i' th' house .? "

A new outbreak of laughter while Mrs. Poyser was speak-
ing, was caused, less by her sudden conversion to a fatalistic
view of jug-breaking, than by that strange appearance of Het-
ty which had started her aunt. The little minx had found a
black gown of her aunt's and pinned it close round her neck
to look like Dinah's, had made her hair as flat as she could,
and had tied on one of Dinah's high-crowned, borderiess net-

2o8 ADAM BEDE.

caps. The thougbl of Dinah's pale grave face and mild graj
eyes, which the sight of the gown and cap brought with it,
made it a laughable surprise enough to see them replaced by
Hetty's round rosy cheeks and coquettish dark eyes. The
boys got off their chairs and jumped round her, clapping their
hands, and even Alick gave a low ventral laugh as he looked
up from his beans. Under cover of the noise, Mrs. Poyser
went into the back kitchen to send Nancy into the cellar with
the great pewter measure, which had some chance of being
free from bewitchment.

" Why, Hetty, lass, are ye turned Methodis ? " said Mr.
Poyser, with that comfortable, slow enjoyment of a laugh
which one only sees in stout people. " You must pull youi
face a deal longer before you'll do for one ; mustna she,
Adam ? How come ye to put them things on, eh ?"

" Adam said he liked Dinah's cap and gown better nor my
clothes," said Hetty, sitting down demurely. " He says folks
look better in ugly clothes."

"Nay, nay," said Adam, looking at her admiringly;"!
only said they seemed to suit Dinah. But if I'd said you'd
look pretty in 'em I should ha' said nothing but what was
true."

" Why, thee thought'st Hetty war a ghost, didstna? " said
Mr. Poyser to his wife, who now came back and took her
seat again. " Thee look'dst as scared as scared."

" It little signifies how I looked," said Mrs. Poyser ; " looks
'ull mend no jugs, nor laughing neither, as I see. Mr. Bede,
I'm sorry you've to wait so long for your ale, but it's coming
in a minute. Make yourself at home wi' the cold potatoes ; I
know you like 'em. Tommy, I'll send you to bed this minute,
if you don't give over laughing. What is thereto laugh at, I
should like to know? I'd sooner cry nor laugh at the sight
o' that poor thing's cap ; and there's them as 'ud be better if
they could make theirselves like her i' more ways nor putting
on her cap. It little becomes anybody i' this house to make
fun o' my sister's child, an her just gone away from us, as it
went to my heart to part wi' her ; an' I know one thing as if
trouble was to come, an' I war to be lain up i' my bed, an' the
children was to die — as there's no knowing but what they will
— an' the murrain was to come among the cattle again, an'
every thing went to rack an' ruin — I say, we might be glad to get
sight o' Dinah's cap again, wi' her own face under it, border
or no border. For she's one o' them things as looks the bright-
est on a rainy day, and loves you the best when you're most
i' need on't."

ADAM BEDE. 200

Mrs. Poyser, you perceive, was aware that nothing would

be so likely to expel the comic as the terrible.

Tommy, who was of a susceptible disposition, and very
fond of his mother, and who had, besides, eaten so many
cherries as to have his feelings less under command than
usual, was so affected by the dreadful picture she had made
of the possible future, that he began to cry ; and the good-
natured father, indulgent to all weaknesses but those of negli-
gent farmers, said to Hetty,

" You'd better take the thinks off again, my lass ; it hurts
your aunt to see 'em."

Hetty went up stairs again, and the arrival of the ale
made an agreeable diversion ; for Adam had to give his
opinion of the new lap, which could not be otherwise than
complimentary to Mrs. Poyser ; and then followed a discus-
sion on the secrets of good brewing, the folly of stinginess in
"hopping," and the doubtful economy of a farmer's making
his own malt. Mrs. Poyser had so many opportunities of ex-
pressing herself with weight on these subjects, that by the
time supper was ended, the ale jug refilled, and Mr. Poyser's
pipe alight, she was once more in good humor, and ready, at
Adam's request, to fetch the broken spinning-wheel for his in-
spection,

" Ah ! '" said Adam, looking at it carefully, " here's a nice
bit o' turning wanted. It's a pretty wheel. I must have it
up at the turning-shop in the village, and da it there, for I've
no convenience for turning at home. If you'll send it to Mr.
Purge's shop i' the morning, I'll get it done for you by Wed-
nesday. I've been turning it over in my mind," he continued
looking at Mr. Poyser, " to make a bit more convenience at
home for nice jobs o' cabinet-making. I've always done a deal
at such little things in odd hours, and they're profitable, for
there's more workmanship nor material in 'em. I look for
me and Seth to get a little business for ourselves i' that way,
for I know a man at Rosseter as '11 take as many things as
we should make, beside what we could get orders for round
about."

Mr. Poyser entered with interest into a project which seemed
a step toward Adam's becoming a " master-man ; " and Mrs.
Poyser gave her approbation to the scheme of the movable
kitchen cupboard, which was to be capable of containing gro-
cery, pickles, crockery, and house-linen, in the utmost com-
pactness, without confusion. Hetty once more in her own
dress, with neckerchief pushed a little backward on this warm

210 ADAM BEDE.

evening, was seated picking currants near the window, where
Adam could see her quite well. And so the time passed pleas-
antly till Adam got up to go. He was pressed to come again
soon, but not to stay longer, for at this busy time sensible
people would not run the risk of being sleepy at five o'clock
in the morning.

"I shall go a step farther," said Adam, "and go on to
see Mester Massey, for he wasn't at church yesterday, and I've
not seen him for a week past. I've never hardly known him
to miss church before."

" Ay," said Mr. Poyser, " we've heard nothing about him,
for it's the boys' hoUodays now, so we can give you no ac-
nount."

" But you'll never think o' going there at this hour o' th'
night ? " said Mrs. Poyser, folding up her knitting,

"Oh, Mester Massey sits up late," said Adam. "An* the
night school's not over yet. Some o' the men don't come till
late, they've got so far to walk. And Eartle himself's never
in bed till it's gone eleven."

" I wouldna have him to live wi' me, ihen," said Mrs.
Poyser, " a-dropping candle-grease about, as you're like to
tumble down o' the floor the first thing i' the morning."

" Ay, eleven o'clock's late — it's late," said old Martin.
" I ne'er sot up so i' my life, not lo say as it warna a marr'in',
or a christenin', or a wake, or th' harvest supper. Eleven
o'clock's late."

" Why, I sit up till after twelve often," said Adam, laugh-
ing, " but it isn't t' eat and drink extry, it's to work extry.
Good-night, Mrs. Poyser ; good-night, Hetty."

Hetty could only smile and not shake hands, for hers were
dyed and damp with currant-juice ; but all the rest gave a
hearty shake to the large palm that was held out to them, and
said, " Come again, come again ! "

" Ay, think o' that now," said Mr. Poyser, when Adam was
out on the causeway. " Sitting up till past twelve to do extry
work ! Ye'll not find many men o' six-an'-twenty as 'uU do to
put i' the shafts wi' him. If you can catch Adam for a hus-
band, Hetty, you'll ride i' your own spring cart some day,
I'll be your warrant."

Hetty was moving across the kitchen with the currnats, so
her uncle did not see'the little toss of the head with which she
answered him. To ride in a spring-cart seemed a very mis-
erable lot indeed to her now.

ADAM BRDE. 211

CHAPTER XXI.

THE NIGHT-SCHOOL AND THE SCHOOLMASTER.

Bartle Massey's was one of a few scattered houses on
the edge of a common, which was divided by the road to Tred-
dieston. Adam reached it in a quarter of an hour after leav-
ing the Hall Farm ; and when he had his hand on the door
latch, he could see, through the curtainless window, that there
were eight or nine heads bending over the desks, lighted by
thin dips.

When he entered, a reading lesson was going forward, and
Bartle Massey merely nodded, leaving him to take his place
where he pleased. He had not come for the sake of a lesson
to-night, and his mind was too full of personal matters, too
full of the last two hours he had passed in Hetty's presence,
for him to amuse himself with a book till school was over ; so
he sat down in a corner, and looked on with an absent mind.
It was a sort of scene which Adam had beheld almost weekly
for years ; he knew by heart every arabesque flourish in the
framed specimen of Bartle Massey's handwriting which hung
over the schoolmaster's head, by way of keeping a lofty ideal
before the minds of his pupils ; he knew the backs of all the
books on the shelf running along the whitewashed wall above
the pegs for the slates ; he knew exactly how many grains
were gone out of the ear of Indian-corn that hung from one
of the rafters ; he had long ago exhausted the resources of his
imagination in trying to think hov/ the bunch of feather^' sea-
weed had looked and grown in its native element ; and from
the place where he sat he could make nothing of the old map
of England that hung against the opposite wall, for age had
turned it of a fine yellow-brown, something like that of a well-
seasoned meerschaum. The drama that was going on was
almost as familiar as the scene, nevertheless habit had not
made him indifferent to it, and even in his present self-absorbed
mood, Adam felt a momentary stirring of the old fellow-feeling,
as he looked at the rough men painfully holding pen or pen-
cil with their cramped hands, or humbly laboring through'
their reading lesson.

The reading class now seated on the form in front of the
schoolmaster's desk, consisted of the three most backward
pupils. Adam would have knov/n it, only by seeing Bartle

212 ADAM BEDE.

Massey's face as he looked over his spectacles, which he had
shifted to the ridge of his nose, not requiring them for present
purposes. The face wore its mildest expression ; the grizzled
bushy eyebrows had taken their more acute angle of compas-
sionate kindness, and the mouth, habitually compressed with
a pout of the lower lip, was relaxed so as to be able to speak
a hopeful word or syllable in a moment. This gentle expres-
sion was the more interesting because the schoolmaster's nose,
an irregular aquiline twisted a little on one side, had rather
a formidable character ; and his brow, moreover, had that pe-
culiar tension which always impresses one as a sign of a keen
impatient temperament ; the blue veins stood out like cords
under the transparent yellow skin, and this intimidating brow
was softened by no tendency to baldness, for the gray bristly
hair, cut down to about an inch in length, stood round it in as
close ranks as ever.

" Nay, Bill, nay," Bartle was saying, in a kind tone, as he
nodded to Adam, " begin that again, and then perhaps it'll
come to you what d, r, y, spells. It's the same lesson you
read last week, you know."

" Bill " was a sturdy fellow, aged four-and-twenty, an ex-
cellent stone-sawyer, who could get as good v.'ages as any man
m the trade of his years ; but he found a reading lesson in
words of one syllable a harder matter to deal with than the
hardest stone he had ever had to saw. The letters, he com-
plained, were so "uncommon alike, there was no tellin' 'em
one from another," the sawyer's business not being concerned
with minute differences such as exist between a letter with its
tail turned up and a letter with its tail turned down. But Bill
had a firm determination that he would learn to read, founded
chiefly on two reasons : first, that Tom Hazelow, his cousin,
could read anything "right off," whether it was print or writ-
ing, and Tom had sent him a letter from twenty miles of?,
saying how he was prospering in the world, and had got an
overlooker's place ; secondly, that Sam Phillips, who sawed
with him, had learned to read when he was turned twenty ;
and what could be done by a little fellow like Sam Phillips,
Bill considered, could be done by himself, seeing that he could
pound Sam into wet clay if circumstances required it. So
here he was, pointing his big finger toward three words at
once, and turning his head on one side that he might keep
better hold with his eye of the one word which was to be dis-
criminated out of the group. The amount of knowledge Bartle
Massey must possess was something so dim and vast that

ADAM BEDE.

213

Bill's imagination recoiled before it ; he would hardly have
ventured to deny that the schoolmaster might have something
to do in bringing about the regular return of daylight and the
changes in the weather.

The man seated next to Bill was of a very different type :
he was a Methodist brickmaker, who, after spending thirty
years of his life in perfect satisfaction with his ignorance, had
lately "got religion," and along with it the desire to read the
Bible. But with him, too, learning was a heavy business, and
on his way out to-night he had offered as usual a special prayer
for help, seeing that he had undertaken this hard task with a
single eye to the nourishment of his soul — that he might have
a greater abundance of texts and hymns wherewith to banish
evil memories and the temptations of old habits ; or, in brief
language, the devii. F'or the brickmaker had been a notori-
ous poacher, and was suspected, though there was no good
evidence against him, of being the man who had shot a neighbor-
ing gamekeeper in the leg. However that might be, it is cer-
tain that shortly after the accident referred to, which was
coincident with the arrival of an awakening Methodist preach-
er at Treddleston, a great change had been observed in the
brickmaker ; and though he was still known in the neighbor-
hood by his old sobriquet of" Brimstone," there was nothing
he held in so much horror as any farther transactions with
that evil-smelling element. He was a broad-chested fellow
with a fervid temperament, which helped him better in imbib-
ing religious ideas than in the dry process of acquiring the
mere human knowledge of the alphabet. Indeed, he had
been already a little shaken in his resolution by a brother
Methodist, who assured him that the letter was a mere ob-
struction to the Spirit, and expressed a fear that Brimstone
was too eager for the knowledge that puffeth up.

The third beginner was a much more promising pupil. He
was a tall but thin and wiry man, nearly as old as Brimstone,
with a very pale face, and hands stained a deep blue. He was
a dyer, who, in the course of dipping home-spun wool and old
women's petticoats, had got fired with the ambition to learn a
great deal more about the strange secrets of color. He had
already a high reputation in the district for his dyes, and he
was bent on discovering some method by which he could re-
duce the expense of crimsons and scarlets. The druggist at
Treddleston had given him a notion that he might save him-
self a great deal of labor and expense if he could learn to read,
and so he had begun to give his spare hours to the night-

214

ADAM BEDE.

school, resolving that his " little chap " should lose no time in
coming to Mr. Massey's day-school as soon as he was old
endugh.

It was touching to see these three big men, with the marks
of their hard labor about them, anxiously bending over the
worn books, and painfully making out, "The grass is green,"
" The sticks are dry," " The corn is ripe" — a very hard lesson to
pass to after columns of single, words all alike except in the
first letter. It was almost as if three rough ani-nals were
making humble efforts to learn how they might become human.
And it touched the tenderest fibre in Bartle Massey's nature,
for such full-grown children as these were the only pupils for
whom he had no severe epithets, and no impatient tones. He
was not gifted with an imperturbable temper, and on music-
nights it was apparent that patience could never be an easy
virtue to him ; but this evening, as he glances over his spec-
tacles at Bill Downes, the sawyer, who is turning his head on
one side with a desperate sense of blankness before the
letters d, r, y, his eyes shed their mildest and most encourag-
ing light.

After the reading class, two youths, between sixteen and
nineteen, came up with imaginary bills of parcels, which they
had been writing out on their slates, and were now required
to calculate " off-hand " — a test which they stood with such
imperfect success, that Bartle Massey, whose eyes had been
glaring at them ominously through his spectacles for some
minutes, at length burst out in a bitter, high-pitched tone,
pausing between every sentence to rap the floor with a knob-
bed stick which rested between his legs.

" Now, you see, you don't do this thing a bit better than
you did a fortnight ago ; and I'll tell you what's the reason.
You want to learn accounts ; that's well and good. But you
think all you need do to learn accounts is to come to me and
do sums for an hour or so, two or three times a week ; and
no sooner do you get your caps on and turn out of doors
again, than you sweep the whole thing clean out of your
mind. You go whistling about, and take no more care what
you're thinking of than if your heads were gutters for any
rubbish to swill through that happened to be in the way ; and
if you get a good notion in 'em, it's pretty soon washed out
again. You think knowledge is to be got cheap — you'll come
and pay Bartle Massey sixpence a week, and he'll make you
clever at figures without your taking any trouble. But knowl-
edge isn't to be got with paying sixpence, let me tell you ; if

ADAM BEDE.

2IS

you're to know figures, you must turn 'em over in 3'^our own
heads, and keep your thoughts fixed on 'em. There's nothing
you can't turn into a sum, for there's nothing but what's got
number in it — even a fool. You may say to yourselves, 'I'm
one fool and Jack's another \ if my fool's head weighed four
pound, and Jack's three pound three ounces and three quar-
ters, how many pennyweights heavier would my head be than
Jack's ? ' A man that has got his heart in learning figures
would make sums for himself, and work 'em in his head ;
when he sat at his shoemaking, he'd count his stichesby fives,
and then put a price on his stitches, say half a farthing, and
then see how much money he could get in an hour ; and
then ask himself how much money he'd get in a day at
that rate ; and then how much ten workmen would get
working three, or twenty, or a hundred years at that rate —
and all the while his needle would be going just as fast as if
he left his head empty for the devil to dance in. But the long
and the short of it is — I'll have nobody in my night-school
that doesn't strive to learn what he comes to learn, as hard as
if he was striving to get out of a dark hole into broad daylight.
I'll send no man away because he is stupid ; if Billy Taft, the
idiot, wanted to learn anything, I'd not refuse to teach him.
But I'll not throw away good knowledge on people who think
they can get it by the sixpenn'orth, and carry it away with
them as they would an ounce of snuff. So never come to
me again, if you can't show that you have been working with
your own heads, instead of thinking you can pay for mine
to work for you. That's the last word I've got to say to
you."

With this final sentence, Bartle Massey gave a sharper rap
than ever with his knobbed stick, and the discomfited lads
got up to go with a sulky look. The other pupils had happily
only their writing-books to show, in various stages of progress
from pot-hooks to round text : and mere pen-strokes, however
perverse, were less exasperating to Bartle than false arith-
metic. He was a little more severe than usual on Jacob
Storey's Z's, of which poor Jacob had written a page full, all
with their tops turned the wrong way, with a puzzled sense
that they were not right " somehow." But he observed in
apology, that it was a letter you never wanted hardly, and he
thought it had only been put there " to finish off th' alphabet,
like, though ampusand (&) would ha' done as well, for what
he could see.''

At last the pupils had all taken their hats and said their

2i6 ADAM BEDE.

" Good-nights," and Adam, knowing his old master's habits,
rose and said, " Shall I put the candles out, Mr. Massey ? "

" Yes, my boy, yes, all but this, which I'll just c^sxy into
the house ; and just lock the outer door, now you're near it,"
said Bartle, getting his stick in the fitting angle to help him in
descending from his stool. He was no sooner on the ground
than it became obvious why the stick was necessary — the
left leg was much shorter than the right. But the school-
master was so active with his lameness that it was hardly
thought of as a misfortune • and if you had seen him make his
way along the school-room floor, and up the step into his
kitchen you would perhaps have understood why the naughty
boys sometimes felt that his pace might be indefinitely quick-
ened, and that he and his stick might overtake them even in
their swiftest run.

The moment he appeared at the kitchen door with the can-
dle in his hand, a faint whimpering began in the chimney-cor-
ner, and a brown-and tan-colored bitch, of that wise-looking
breed, with short legs and long body, known to an unmechan-
ical generation as turn-spits, came creeping along the floor,
wagging her tail, and hesitating at every other step, as if her
affections were painfully divided between the hamper in the
chimney-corner and the master, whom she could not leave
without a greeting.

" Well, Vixen, well then, how are the babbies ? " said the
schoolmaster, making haste toward the chimney-corner, and
holding the candle over the low hamper, where two extremely
blind puppies lifted up their heads toward the light, from a nest
of flannel and wool. Vixen could not even see her master
look at them without painful excitement ; she got into the
hamper and got out again tlie next moment, and behaved with
true feminine folly, though looking all the while as wise as a
dwarf with a large and old-fashioned head and body on the
most abbreviated legs.

" Why, you've got a family, I see, Mr. Massey ? " said
Adam, smiling as became into the kitchen. "How's that!
I thought it was against the law here."

" Law ? What's the use o' law when a man's once such a
fool as to let a woman into his house ? " said Bartle, turning
away from the hamper with some bitterness. He always
called Vixen a woman, and seemed to have lost all conscious-
ness that he was using a figure of speech. " If I'd known
Vixen was a woman^ I'd never have held the boys from drown-
ing her j but when I'd got her into my hand, I was forced to

ADAM BEDE.

217

take to her. And now you see what she's brought me to—
the sly, hypocritical wench " — Bartle spoke these last words
in a rasping tone of reproach, and looked at Vixen, who poked
down her head and turned up her eyes toward him with a
keen sense of the opprobrium — "and contrived to be brought
to bed on a Sunday at church-time. I've wished again and
again I'd been a bloody-minded man, that I could have
strangled the mother and the brats with one cord."

" I'm glad it was no worse a cause kept you from church,"
said Adam. " I was afraid you must be ill for the first time
i' your life. And I was particularly sorry not to have you at
church yesterday ''

" Ah ! my boy, I know why, I know why," said Bartle,
kindly, going up to Adam, and raising his hand up to the
shoulder that was almost on a level with his own head.
" You've had rough bit o' road to get over since I saw you —
a rough bit o' road. But I'm in hopes there are better times
coming for you. I've got some news to tell you. But I must
get my supper first, for I'm hungry, I'm hungry. Sit down,
sit down."

Bartle went into his little pantry, and brought out an ex-
cellent home-baked loaf ; for it was his one extravagance in
these dear times to eat bread once a day instead of oat-cake ;
and he justified it by observing that what a schoolmaster
wanted was brains, and oat-cake ran too much to bone in-
stead of brains. Then came a piece of cheese and a quart
jug with a crown of foam upon it. He placed them all on
the round deal table which stood against his large arm-chair
in the chimney-corner, with Vixen's hamper on one side of it,
and a window-shelf with a few books piled up in it on the
other. The table was as clean as if Vixen had been an
excellent housewife in a checkered apron ; so was the quarry
floor ; and the old carved oaken press, table, and chairs,
which in these days would be bought at a high price in
aristocratic houses, though, in that period of spider-legs and
inlaid cupids, Bartle had got them for an old song, were
as free from dust as things could be at the end of a summer's
day.

" Now then, my boy, draw up, draw up. We'll not talk
about business till we've had our supper. No man can be wise
on an empty stomach. But," said Bartle, rising from his chair
again, " I must give Vixen her supper too, confound her !
though she'll do nothing with it but nourish those unnecessary
babbies. That's the way "with these women — they've got no

2 15 ADAM BRDE.

headpieces to nourish, and so their food all runs either to fat
or to brats."

He brought out of the pantry a dish of scraps, which Vixen
at once fixed her eyes on, and jumped out of her hamper to
lick up with the utmost dispatch.

"I've had my supper, Mr. Massey," said Adam, "so I'll
look on while you eat yours. I've been at the Hall Farm, and
they always have their supper betimes, you know ; they don't
keep your late hours."

" I know little about their hours," said Bartle, dryly, cut-
ting his bread and not shrinking from the crust. " It's a
house I seldom go into, though I'm fond of the boys, and
Martin Poyser's a good fellow. There's too many women in
the house for me ; I hate the sound of women's voices ;
they're always either a-buzz or a-squeak, Mrs. Poyser keeps
at the top o' the talk, like a fife ; and as for the young lasses,
I'd as soon look at water-grubs — I know what they'll turn to
— stinging gnats, stinging gnats. Here, take some ale, my
boy ; it's been drawn for you, it's been drawn for you."

" Nay, Mr. Massey," said Adam, who took his old friend's
whim more seriously than usual to-night, " don't be so hard
on the creaturs God has made to be companions for us.
A working man 'ud be badly off without a wife to see to
th' house and the victual, and make things clean and com-
fortable."

" Nonsense 1 It's the silliest lie a sensible man like you
ever believed, to say a woman makes a house comfortable.
It's a story got up, because the women are there, and some-
thing must be found for 'em to do. I tell you there isn't a
thing under the sun that needs to be done at all but what a
man can do better than a woman, unless it's bearing children,
and they do that in a poor make-shift way ; it had better ha'
been left to the men — it had better ha' been left to the men.
I tell you a woman 'ull bake you a pie every week of her life,
and never come to see that the hotter th' oven the shorter the
time. I tell you a woman 'ull make your porridge every day
for twenty years, and never think of measuring the proportion
between the meal and the milk — a little more or less, she'll
think, doesn't signify ; the porridge ivill be awk'ard now and
then ; if it's wrong, it's summat in the milk, or it's summat in
the water. Look at me ! I make my own bread, and there's
no difference between one batch and another from year's end
to 5''ear's end ; but if I'd got any other woman besides Vixen
in the house, I must pray to the Lord every baking to give me

ADAAf BEDS. 219

patience if tiie bread turned out heavy. And as for clean,
liness, my house is cleaner than any other house on the Com-
mon, though the half of 'em swarm with women. Will Baker's
lad comes to help me in a morning, and we get as much
cleaning done in one hour without any fuss as a woman 'ud
get done in three, and all the while be sending buckets o'
water after your ankles, and let the fender and the fire-irons
stand in the middle o' the floor half the day for you to break
your shins against 'em. Don't tell me about God having
made such creatures to be companions for us ! I don't say
but he might make Eve to be a companion to Adam in
Paradise ; there was no cooking to be spoiled there, and no
other woman to cackle with and make mischief, though you
see what mischief she did as soon as she'd an opportunity.
But it's an impious unscriptural opinion to say a woman's a
blessing to a man now ; you might as well say adders, and
wasps, and hogs, and wild beasts are a blessing, when they're
only the evils that belong to this state o' probation, which it's
lawful for a man to keep as clear of as he can in this life, hop-
ing to get quit of 'em forever in another— hoping to get quit
of 'em forever in another."

Bartle had become so excited and angry in the course of his
invective that he had forgotten his supper, and only used the
knife for the purpose of rapping the table with the haft. But
towards the close the raps became so sharp and frequent, and
his voice so quarrfilsome, that Vixen felt incumbent on her to
jump out of the hamper and bark vaguely.

" Quiet, Vixen ! " snarled Bartle, turning round upon her.
" You're like the rest o' the women — always putting^in youf
word before you know why."

Vixen returned to her hamper again in humiliation, and
her master continued his supper in a silence which Adam did
not choose to interrupt ; he knew the old man would be in
a better humor when he had had his supper and lighted his
pipe. Adam was used to hear him talk in this way, but had
never learned so much of Bartle's past life as to know whether
his view of married comfort was foimded on experience. Ot?
that point Bartle was mute ; and it was even a secret where
he had lived previous to the twenty years in which, happilj
for the peasants and artisans of this neighborhood, he had
been settled among them as their old schoolmaster. If any-
thieg like a question was ventured on this subject, Bartle re-
plied, " Oh, I've seen many places — ^^ve been a deal in the
south," and the Loamshire men would as soon have thought

220 ADAM BEDE.

of asking ror a particular town or village in Africa as in " the
south."

" Now then, my boy," said Bartle at last, when he had
poured out his second mug of ale and lighted his pipe — " now
then, we'll have a little talk. But tell me first, have you heard
any particular news to-day ? "

" No," said Adam, " not as I remember."

" Ah ! they'll keep it close, they'll keep it close, I dare
say. But I found it out by chance ; and it's news that may
concern you, Adam, else I'm a man that don't know a super
ficial square foot from a solid."

Here Bartle gave a series of fierce and rapid puffs, looking
earnestly the while at Adam. Your impatient loquacious
man has never any notion of keeping his pipe alight by gentle
measured puffs ; he is always letting it go nearly out, and
then punishing it for that negligence. At last he said,

" Satchell's got a paralytic stroke. I found it out from the
lad they sent to Treddleston for the doctor, before seven
o'clock this morning. He's a good way beyond sixty, you
know ; it's much if he gets over it."

" Well," said Adam, " I dare say there'd be more rejoicing
than sorrow in the parish at his being laid up. He's been a
selfish, tale-bearing, mischievous fellow ; but, after all, there's
nobody he's done so much harm to as to th' old Squire.
Though it's the Squire himself as is to blame — making a stu-
pid fellow like that a sort o' man-of-all-work, just to save th'
expense of having a proper steward to look after th' estate.
And he's lost more by ill-management o' the woods, I'll be
bound, than 'ud pay for two stewards. If he's laid on the
shelf it's to be hoped he'll make way for a better man ; but I
don't see how it's to make any difference to me."

"But I see it, but I see it," said Bartle, " and others be-
sides me. The Captain's coming of age now — you know that
as well as I do — and it's to be expected he'll have a little
more voice in things. And I know, and you know too, what
'ud be the Captain's wish about the woods, if there was a fair
opportunity for making a change. He's said in plenty of
people's hearing that he'd make you manager of the woods
to-morrow if he'd the power. Why, Carrol, Mr. Irwine's but-
ler, heard him say so to the parson not many days ago. Carrol
looked in when we were smoking our pipes o' Saturday night
at Casson's, and he told us about it ; and whenever anybody
says a good word for you, the parson's ready to back it, that
I'll answer for. It was pretty well talked over, I can tell you ;

ADAM BEBB. 221

at Casson's, and one and another had their fling at you \ foT
if donkeys set to work to sing, you are pretty sure what the
tune '11 be."

" Why, did they talk it over before Mr. Burge ? " said
Adam ; " or wasn't he there o' Saturday ? "

" Oh, lie went away before Carrol came j and Casson —
he's always for setting other folks right, you know — would
have it Burge was the man to have the management of the
woods. ' A substantial man,' says he, ' with pretty near sixty
years' experience o' timber ; it 'ud be all very well for Adam
Bede to act under him, but it isn't to be supposed the Squire 'd
appoint a young fellow like Adam, when there's his elders
and betters at hand ? ' But I said, ' That's a pretty notion o'
yours, Casson. Why, Burge is the man to buy timber ; would
you put the woods into his hands, and let him make his own
bargains? I think you don't leave your customers to score
their own drink, do you ? And as for age, what that's worth
depends on the quality of the liquor. It's pretty well known
who's the backbone of Jonathan Burge's business.'"

" I thank you for your good word, Mr. Massey," said
Adam. " But, for all that, Casson was partly i' the right for
once. There's not much likelihood that th' old Squire 'ud
ever consent t' employ me ; I offended him about two years
ago, and he's never forgiven me."

" Why, how was that ? You never told me about it,"
said Bartle.

" Oh, it was a bit o' nonsense. I'd made a frame for a
screen for Miss Lyddy — she's always making something with
her worsted-work, you know — and she'd given me particular
orders about this screen, and there was as much talking and
measuring as if we'd been planning a house. However, it
was a nice bit o' work, and I liked doing it for her. But, you
know, those little friggling things take a deal o' time. I
only worked at it over-hours — often late at night — and I had
to go to Treddleston over an' over again, about little bits o'
brass nails and such gear ; and I turned the little knobs and
the legs, and carved th' open work, after a pattern, as nice
as could be. And I was uncommon pleased with it when it
was done. And when I took it home. Miss Lyddy sent for
me to bring it into her drawing-room, so as she might give
me directions about fastening on the work — very fine needle-
work, Jacob and Rachel a-kissing one another among the
sheep, like a picture — and th' old Squire was setting there,
for he mostly sits with her. Well, she was mighty pleased

422 ADAM BEGS.

with the screen, and then she wanted to know what pay she
was to give me. I didn't speak at random — you know it's
not my way ; I'd calculated pretty close, though I hadn't
made out a bill, and I said, one pound thirteen. That was
paying for the mater'als and paying me, but none too much
for my work. The old Squire looked up at this, and peered
in his way at the screen, and said, ' One pound thirteen for a
gimcrack like that ! Lydia, my dear, if you must spend money
on these things, why don't you get them at Rosseter, instead
of paying double price for clumsy work here ? Such things
are not work for a carpenter like Adam. Give him a guinea,
and no more.' Well, Miss J^yddy, I reckon, believed what
he told her, and she's not overfond o' parting with the money
herself — she's not a bad woman at bottom, but she's been
brought up under his thumb ; so she began fidgeting with her
purse, and turned as red as her ribbon. But 1 made a bow,
and said, ' No, thank you, madam ; I'll make you a present
o' the screen, if you please. I've charged the regular price
for my work, and I know it's done well ; and I know, begging
his honor's pardon, that you couldn't get such a screen at
Rosseter under two guineas. I'm willing to give you my
work — it's been done in my own time, and nobody's got any-
thing to do with it but me ; but if I'm paid, I can't take a
smaller price than I asked, because that 'ud be like saying,
I'd asked more than was just. With your leave, madam, I'll
bid you good-morning.' I made my bow and went out before
she'd time to say any more, for she stood with her purse in
her hand, looking almost foolish, I didn't mean to be disre-
spectful, and I spoke as polite as I could ; but I can give in
to no man, if he wants to make it out as I'm trying t' over-
reach him. And in the evening the footman brought me the
one pound thirteen wrapped in paper. But since then I've
5een pretty clear as th' old squire can't abide me."

" That's likely enough — that's likely enough," said Bartle,
meditatively. " The only way to bring him round would be to
ehow him what was for his own interest, and that the captain
may do — that the captain may do."

" Nay, I don't know," said Adam ; " the squire's 'cute
enough, but it t&kes^ something else besides 'cuteness to make
folks see what'Il be thsir interest in the long run. It takes
some conscience and belief in right and wrong. I see that
pretty clear. You'd hardly ever bring round th' old squire to
believe he'd gain as much in a straightfor'ard way as by tricks
and turns. And, besides, I've noi much mind to work under

ADAM BEDE.

223

him : I don*t want to quarrel with any gentleman, more par-
ticularan' old gentleman turned eighty, and I know we couldn't
agree long. If the captain was master o' th' estate, it 'ud be
different, he's got a conscience, and a will to do right, and I'd
sooner work for him nor for any man living."

" Well, well, my boy, if good-luck knocks at your door, don't
you put your head out at window and tell it to be gone about
its business, that's all. You must learn to deal with odd and
even in life, as well as in figures. I tell you now, as I told you
ten years ago, when you pommelled young Mike Holdsworth
for wanting to pass a bad shilling, before you knew whether
he was in jest or earnest — you're over-hasty and proud, and
apt to set your teeth against folks that don't square to your
notions. It's no harm forme to be a bit fier}' and stiff-backed ;
I'm an old schoolmaster, and shall never want to get on to a
higher perch. But where's the use of all the time I've spent
in teaching you writing and mapping and mensuration, if you're
not to get for'ard in the world, and show folks there's some
advantage in having a head on their shoulders, instead of a
turnip .'' Do you mean to go on turning up. your nose at every
opportunity, because it's got a bit of a smell about it that no-
body finds out but yourself ? It's as foolish as that notion
of yours that a wife is to make a working-man comfortable.
Stuff and nonsense ! stuff and nonsense ! Leave that to fools
that never got beyond a sum in simple addition. Simple ad-
dition enough ! Add one fool to another fool, and in six years'
time six fools more — they're all of the same denomination, big
and little's nothing to do with the sum ! "

During this rather heated exhortation to coolness and dis-
cretion, the pipe had gone out, and Bartle gave the climax to
his speech by lighting a match furiously against the hob, after
which he puffed with fierce resolution, fixing his eyes still on
Adam, who was trying not to laugh.

" There's a good deal o' sense in what you say, Mr. Massey,"
Adam began, as soon as he felt quite serious, " as there always
is. But you'll give in that it's no business o' mine to be build-
ing on chances that may never happen. What I've got to do
is to work as well as I can with the tools and mater'als I've got
in my hands. If a good chance comes to me, I'll think o' what
you've been saying; but till then, I've got nothing to do but
to trust to my own hands and my own head-piece. I'm turn-
ing over a little plan for Seth and me to go into the cabinet-
making a bit by ourselves, and win a extra pound or two in
that way. But it's getting late now — it'll be pretty near eleven

224

DAM BEDS.

before I'm at home, and mother may happen to lie awake ;
she's more fidgety nor usual now. So I'll bid you good-
night."

" Well, well, we'll go to the gate with you — it's a fine night,"
said Bartle, taking up his stick. Vixen was at once on her
legs, and without farther words the three walked out into the
starlight, by the side of Bartle's potato-beds, to the little gate.

" Come to the music o' Friday night, if you can, my boy,"
said the old man, as he closed the gate after Adam, and leaned
against it.

" Ay, ay," said Adam, striding along toward the streak of
pale road. He was the only object moving on the wide com-
mon. The two gray donkeys, just visible in front of the gorse
bushes, stood as still as limestone images — as still as the grav-
thatched roof of the mud cottage a little farther on. Bartle
kept his eye on the moving figure till it passed into the dark-
ness ; while Vixen, in a state of divided affection, had twice
run back to the house to bestow a parenthetic lick on her
puppies.

" Ay, ay." muttered the schoolmaster, as Adam disap-
peared ; " there you go stalking along — stalking along ; but
you wouldn't have been what you are if you hadn't had a bit
of old lame Bartle inside you. The strongest calf must have
something to suck at. There's plenty of these big, lumbering
fellows 'ud have never known their A B c, if it hadn't been for
Bartle Massey. Well, well, Vixen, you foolish wench, what is
it, what is it .^ I must go in, must I ^ Ay, ay, I'm never to
have a will o' my own any more. And those pups, what do
you think I'm to do wifh 'em when they're twice as big as you?
— for I'm pretty sure the father was that hulking bull-terrier
of Will Baker's — wasn't he now, eh, you sly hussy ? " (Here
Vixen tucked her tail between her legs, and ran forward into
the house. Subjects are sometimes broached which a well-
bred female will ignore.)

" But Where's the use of talking to a woman with babbies ? "
continued Bartle, " she's got no ■oowjci^nce — no conscience
— it's all run to milk 1 "

ADAM BEDE. 325

CHAPTER XXII.

GOING TO THE BIRTHDAY FEAST.

The thirtieth of July was come, and it was one of those
half dozen warm days which sometimes occur in the middle of
a rainy English summer. No rain had fallen for the last three
or four days, and the weather was perfect for that time of the
year: there was less dust than usual on the dark green hedge-
rows, and on the wild chamomile that starred the roadside,
yet the grass was dry enough for the little children to roll on
it, and there was no cloud but a long dash of light, downy
ripple, high, high up in the far-off blue sky. Perfect weather
for an out-door July merry-making, yet surely not the best
time of year to be born in. Nature seems to make a hot
pause just then — all the loveliest flowers are gone ; the sweet
time of early growth and vague hopes is past ; and yet the
time of harvest and ingathering is not come, and we tremble
at the possible storms that may ruin the precious fruit in the
momeni of its ripeness. The woods are all of one dark monot-
onous green ; the wagon-loads of hay no longer creep along the
lanes, scattering their sweet-smelling fragments on the black-
berry branches ; the pastures are often a little tanned, yet the
corn has not got its last splendor of red and gold ; the lambs
and calves have lost all traces of their innocent, frisky pretti-
ness and have become stupid young sheep and cows. But it
is a time of leisure on the farm — that pause between hay and
corn-harvest, and so the farmers and laborers in Hayslope
and Broxton thought the captain did well to come of age just
then, when they could give their undivided minds to the flavor
of the great cask of ale which had been brewed the autumn
after " the heir " was born and was to be tapped on his
twents^-first birthday. The air had been merry with the ring-
ing of church bells very early this morning, and every one had
made haste to get through the needful work before twelve,
when it would be time to think of getting ready to go to the
Chase.

The midday sun was streaming into Hetty's bedchamber,
and there was no blind to temper the heat with which it fell on
her head as she looked at herself in the old specked glass.
Still, that was the only glass she had in which she could see
her neck and arms, for the small hanging glass she had

X5 •

226 ADAM BEDE.

fetched out of the next room — the room that had been Dinah's
— would show her nothing but her little chin, and that beau-
tiful bit of neck where the roundness of her cheek melted into
another roundness shadowed by dark delicate curls. And to-
day she thought more than usual about her neck and arms ; for
at the dance this evening she was not to wear any neckerchief,
and she had been busy yesterday with her spotted pink-and-
white frock, that she might make the sleeves either long or
short at will. She was dressed now just as she was to be in
the evening, with a tucker made of " real " lace, which her aunt
had lent her for this unparalleled occasion, but with no orna
ments besides ; she had even taken out her small round ear-
rings which she wore every day. But there was something
'more to be done, apparently, before she put on her necker-
chief and long sleeves, which she was to wear in the daytime,
for now she unlocked the drawer that held her private
treasures. It is more than a month since we saw her unlock
that drawer before, and now it holds new treasures, so much
more precious than the old ones that these are thrust into the
corner. Hetty would not care to put the large colored glass
earrings into her ears now ; for see ! she has got a beautiful
pair of gold and pearls and garnet, lying snugly in a pretty
little box lined with white satin. Oh, the delight of taking
out that little box and looking at the earrings ! Do not reason
about it, my philosophical reader, and say that Hetty, being
very pretty, must have known that it did not signify whether
she had on any ornaments or not : and that, moreover, to
look at earrings which she could not possibly wear out of her
bedroom could hardly be a satisfaction, the essence of vanity
being a reference to the impressions produced on others ; you
will never understand women's natures if you are so excessively
rational. Try rather to divest yourself of all your rational
prejudices, as much as if you were studying the psychology
of a canary-bird, and only watch the movements of this pretty
round creature as she turns her head on one side with an un-
conscious smile at the earrings nestled in the little box. Ah !
you think, it is for the sake of the person who has given them to
her, und her thoughts are gone back now to the moment when
they were put into her hands. No ; else why should she have
Ckred to have earrings rather than anything else ? and I know
that she had longed for earrings from among all the ornaments
she could imagine.

" Little, little ears ! " Arthur had said, pretending to pincb
tb«m one evening, as Hetty sat beside him on the grass wilb

41? AM BEDE. 227

out her hat. " I wish I had some pretty earrings ! " she said

in a moment, ahnost before she knew what she was sayin^-

the wish lay so close to her lips, it would Mxi^x past them at
the slightest breath. And the next day — it was only last week
— Arthur had ridden over to Rosseter on purpose to buy them.
That little wish so naively uttered, seemed to him the pret-
tiest bit of childishness — he had never heard anything like it
before ; and he had wrapped the box up in a great many covers,
that he might see Hetty unwrapping it with growing curiosity'
till at last her eyes flashed back their new delight in his.

No, she was not thinking most of the giver when she
smiled at the earrings, for now she is taking them out of the
box, not to press them to her lips, but to fasten them in her ears
— only for one moment to see how pretty they look, as she
peeps at them in the glass against the wall, with first one position
of the head and then another, like a listening bird. It is impos-
sible to be wise on the subject of earrings as one looks at her ;
what should those delicate pearls and crystals be made for, if not
for such ears .? One cannot even find fault with the tiny'round
hole which they leave when they are taken out j perhaps water-
nixies, and such lovely things without souls, have these little
round holes in their ears by nature, ready to hang jewels in.
And Hetty must be one of them ; it is too painful to think that
she is a woman, with a woman's destiny before her — a woman
spinning in young ignorance a light web of folly and vain hopes
which may one day close round her and press upon her, a ran-
corous poisoned garment, changing all at once her fluttering,
trivial butterfly sensations into a life of deep human anguish.

But she cannot keep in the earrings long, else she may
make her uncle and aunt wait. She puts them quickly into
the box again, and shuts them up. Some day she will be able
to wear any earrings she likes, and already she lives in an in-
visible world of brilliant costumes, shimmering gauze, soft satin,
and velvet, such as the lady's maid at the Chase has shown
her in Miss Lydia's wardrobe \ she feels the bracelets on her
arms, and treads on a soft carpet in front of a tall mirror.
But she has one thing in the drawer which she can venture to
wear to day, because she can hang it on the chain of dark-
brown berries which she has been used to wear on giand days,
with a tiny flat scent-bottle at the end of it tucked inside her
frock ; and she must put on her brown berries — her neck
would look so unfinished without it. Hetty was not quite so
fond of the locket as of the earrings, though it was a handsome
large locket, with enamelled flowers at the back, and a beauti«

2 28 AVAM BFDE.

ful gold border round the glass, which showed a light-brown,
slightly-waving lock, forming a background tor two little dark
rings. She must keep it under her clothes, and no one would
see it. But Hetty had another passion ; only a little less
strong than her love of finery, and that other passion made
her like to wear the locket even hidden in her bosom. She
would always have worn it, if she had dared to encounter her
aunt's questions about a ribbon around her neck. So now
she slipped it on her long chain of dark-brown berries, and
snapped the chain round her neck. It was not a very long
chain, only allowing the locket to hang a little way below the
edge of her frock. And she now had nothing to do but to put
on her long sleeves, her new white gauze neckerchief, and
her straw hat trimmed with while to-day, instead of the pink,
which had become rather faded under the July sun. That hat
made the drop of bitterness in Hetty's cup to-day, for it was not
quite new — everybody would see that it was a little tanned
against the white ribbon — and Mary Burge, she felt sure, would
have a new hat or bonnet on. She looked for consolation at
her fine white cotton stockings ; they really were very nice in-
deed, and she had given almost all her spare money for them.
Hetty's dream of the future could not make her insensible to
triumph in the present ; to be sure, Captain Donnithorne loved
her so, that he would never care about looking at other people,
but then those other people didn't know how he loved her, and
she was not satisfied to appear shabby and insignificant in
their eyes even for a short space.

The whole party was assembled in the house-place when
Hetty went down, all of course in their Sunday clothes ; and
the bells had been ringing so this morning in honor of the
captain's twenty-first birthday, and the work had all been got
done so early, that Marty and- Tommy were not quite easy in
their minds until their mother had assured them that going to
church was not part of the day's festivities. Mr. Poyser had
once suggested that the house should be shut up, and left to
take care of itself ; " for," said he, "there's no danger of any
bodys breaking in — ivery body'll be at the Chase, thieves an'
all. If we lock th' house up, all the men can go ; it's a day
they wonna see twice in their lives." But Mrs. Poyser an-
swered with great decision : " I never left the house to take
care of itself since I was a missis, and I niver will. Therp'c
been ill-looking tramps enoo' about the place this lasr wecK,
to carry off ivery ham an' ivery spoon we'n got: and they all
collogue together, them tramps, as it s a mercy they hanna

ADAM BEDE.

229

come and pisoned the dogs and murdered us all in our beds
afore we know"d, some Friday night when we'n got the money
in th' house to pay the men. And it's like enough tlie
tramps know where we're going as well as we do oursens ; for
if Old Harry wants any work done, you maybe sure he'll find
the means.*'

'' Nonsense about murdering us in our beds," said Mr.
Poyser , " I've got a gun i' our room, hanna 1 1 and thee'st
got ears as 'ud find it out if a mouse was knawing the bacon.
Howiver, if thou wouldstna be easy, Alick can stay at home
i' the forepart o' the day, and Tom can come back tow'rds
five o'clock, and let Alick have his turn. They may let Grow-
ler loose if anybody offers to do mischief, and there's Alick's
dog, too, ready enough to set his tooth in a tramp if Alick
gives hmi a wink."

Pvlrs. Poyser accepted this compromise, but thought it ad-
visable to bar and bolt to the utmost ; and now, at the last
moment before starting, Nancy, the dairy-maid, was closing
the shutters of the house-place, although that window, lying
under the immediate observation of Alick and the dogs, might
have been supposed the least likely to be selected for a bur-
glarious attempt.

The covered cart, without springs, was standing ready to
carry the whole family except the men-servants ; Mr. Poyser
and the grandfather sat on the seat in front, and within there
was room for all the women and children ; the fuller the cart
the better, because then the jolting would not hurt so much,
and Nancy's broad person and thick arms were an excellent
cushion to be pitched on. But Mr. Poyser drove at no more
than a walking pace, that there might be as little risk of jolt-
ing as possible on this warm day ; and there was time to ex-
change greetings and remarks with the foot-passengers who
were going the same way, specking the paths between the
green meadows and the golden cornfields with bits of movable
bright color — a scarlet waistcoat to match the poppies that
nodded a little too thickly among the corn, or a dark-blue
neckerchief with ends flaunting across a brand new white
smock-frock. All Broxton and all Hayslope were to be at
the Chase, and make merry there in honor of "th' heir ; " and
the old men and women, who had never been so far down this
side of the hill for the last twenty years, were being brought
from Broxton and Hayslope in one of the farmer's wagons,
at Mr. Irwine's suggestion. The church bells had struck up
again now — a last tune, before the ringers came dewn the hill

230 ADAM BEDE.

to have their share of the festival ; and before the bells had
finisiitd, other music was heard approaching, so that even Old
Brown, the sober horse that was drawing Mr. Poyser's cart,
began to prick up his ears. It was the band of the Benefit
Club, which had mustered in all its glory ; that is to say, in
bright-blue scarfs and blue favors, and carrying its banner
with the motto, " Let brotherly love continue," encircling a
picture of a stone-pit.

The carts, of course, were not to enter the Chase. Every
one must get dowa at the lodges, and the vehicles must be
sent back.

" Why, the Chase is like a fair a'ready," said Mrs. Poyser
as she got down from the cart, and sav/ the groups scattered
under the great oaks, and the boys running about in the hot
sunshine to survey the tall poles surmounted by the fluttering
garments that were to be the prize of the successful climbers.
" I should ha' thought there wasna so many people i' the two
parishes. Massy on us ! how hot it is out o' the shade.
Come here, Totty, else your little face 'uU be burnt to a
scratchin' ! They might ha' cooked the dinners i' that open
space, an' saved the fires. I shall go to Mrs. Best's room an'
sit down."

"Stop a bit, stop a bit," said Mr. Po3'ser. " There's th'
wagin comin' wi' the old folks in't ; it'll be such a sight as
wonna come o'er again, to see 'em get down an' walk along
all together. You remember some on 'em i' their prime, eh,
father?"

'' Ay, ay," said old Martin, walking slowly under the
shades of the lodge porch, from which he could see the aged
party descend. " I remember Jacob Taft walking fifty mile
after the Scotch raj'bels, w^hen they turned back from Stoni-
ton."

He felt himself quite a youngster with a long life before
him, as he saw the Hayslope patriarch, old Feyther Taft, de-
scend from the wagon, and walk toward him, in his brown
night-cap, and leaning on his two sticks.

" Well, Mester Taft," shouted old Martin, at the utmost
stretch of his voice — for though he knew the old man was
stone-deaf, he could not omit the propriety of a greeting —
"you're hearty yit. You can enjoy yoursen to-day, for all
you're ninety an' better."

" Your sarvant, mesters. your sarvant," said Feyther Taft
in a treble tone, perceiving that he was in company.

The aged group, under care of sons or daughters, them-

ADAM BEDE. ^ ,

selves worn and gray, passed on along the least winding car-
riage-road toward the house where a special table was prepared
for them ; while the Poyser party wisely struck across the
grass under the shade of the great trees, but not out of view
of the house-front, with its sloping lawn and flower-beds, or
of the pretty striped marquee at the edge of the lawn, stand-
ing at right angles with two larger marquees on each side of
the open green space where the games were to be played.
The house would have been nothing but a plain, square man-
sion of Queen Anne's time, but for the remnant of an old
abbey to which it was united at one end, in much the same
way as one may sometimes see a new farm house rising high
and prim at the end of older and lower farm-offices. The fine
old remnant stood a little backward and under the shadow ol
tall beeches, but the sun was now on the taller and more ad-
vanced front, the blinds were all down, and the house seemed
asleep in the hot midday ; it made Hetty quite sad to look
at it; Arthur must be somewhere in the back rooms, with the
grand company, where he could not possibly know that she

was come, and she would not see him for a long, long while

not till after dinner, when they said he was to come up and
make a speech.

But Hetty was wrong in part of her conjecture. No grand
company was come, except the Irwines, for whom the carriage
had been sent early, and Arthur was at that moment not in\
back room, but walking with the rector into the broad stone
cloisters of the old abbey, where the long tables were laid for
all the cottage tenants and the farm-servants. A very hand-
some young Briton he looked to-day, in high spirits and a
bright-blue frock-coat. The highest rnode — his arm no longer
in a sling. So open-looking and candid, too ; but candid
people have their secrets, and secrets leave no lines in young
faces.

" Upon my word," he said, as he entered the cool clois-
ters. " I think the cottagers have the best of it ; these cloisters
make a delightful dining-room on a hot day. That was capital
advice of yours, Irwine, about the dinners — to let them be as
orderly and comfortable, as possible, and only for the tenants ;
especially as I had only a limited sum after all ; for though my
grandfather talked of carte blanche, he couldn't make up his
mind to trust me, when it came to the point."

Nevermind, you'll give more pleasure in this quiet way,"
said Mr. Irwine. " In this sort of thing people are constantly
confounding liberality with riot and disorder. It souads very

232

ADAM BEDE.

grand to say that so many sheep and oxen were roasted whole,
and everybody ate who liked to come ; but in the end it gen-
erally hapjDens that no one has had an enjoyable meal. If the
people get a good dinner and a moderate quantity of ale in
the middle of the day, they'll be able to enjoy the games as
the day cools. You can't hinder some of them from getting
too much toward evening, but drunkenness ai;d darkness go
better together than drunkenness and daylight."

" Well, I hope there won't be much of it. I've kept the
Treddleston people away by having a feast for them in the
town ; and I've got Casson and Adam Bede, and some other
good fellows, to look to the giving out of ale in the booths, and
to take care things don't go too far. Come, let us go up above
now, and see the dinner-tables for the large tenants."

They went up the stone staircase leading simply to the
long gallery above the cloisters, a gallery where all the dusty,
worthless old pictures had been banished for the last three
generations — mouldy portraits of Queen Elizabeth and her
ladies. General Monk with his eye knocked out, Daniel very
much in the dark among the lions, and Julius Caesar on horse-
back, with a high nose and a laurel crown, holding his Com-
mentaries in his hand.

" What a capital thing it is that they saved this piece of
the old abbey," said Arthur. "If I'm ever master here, I
shall do up the gallery in first-rate style ; we've got no room
in the house a third as large as this. That second table is foi
the farmers' wives and children : Mrs. Best said it would be
more comfortable for the mothers and children to be by them-
selves. I was determined to have the children, and make a
regular family thing of it. I shall be • the old squire ' to those
little lads and lasses some day. and thev'H tell their children
what a much finer young fellow I was than my own son.
There's a table for the women and children below as well.
But you will see them all — you will come up with me after
dinner, I hope ? "

" Yes, to be sure," said Mr. Irwine. " I wouldn't miss
your maiden speech to the tenantry."

" And there will be something else you'll like to hear,"
said Arthur. " Let's go into the librar}', and I'll tell you all
about it while my grandfather is in the drawing-room with the
ladies. Something that will surprise you," he continued, as
they sat down. " My grandfather has come round after all."

" What, about Adam ? "

•' Yes ; I should have ridden over to tell you about it,

ADAM BEDE.

233

only I was so busy. You know I told you I had quite given
up arguing the matter with him — I thought it was hopeless \
but yesterday morning he asked me to come in here to him
before I went out, and astonished me by saying that he had
decided on all the new arrangements he should make in con-
sequence of old Satchell being obliged to lay by work, and
that he intended to employ Adam in superintending the woods
at a salary of a guinea a week, and the use of a pony, to be
kept here. I believe the secret of it is, he saw from the first
it would be a profitable plan, but he had some particular dis-
like to Adam to get over — and besides, the fact that I pro-
pose a thing is generally a reason with him for rejecting it
There's the most curious contradiction in my grandfather ; I
know he means to leave me all the money he has saved, and he
is likely enough to have cut off poor Aunt Lydia, who has been
a slave to him all her life, with only five hundred a year, for
the sake of giving me all the more ; and yet I sometimes think
he positively hates me because I'm his heir. I believe if I
were to break my neck he would feel it the greatest misfor-
tune that could befall him, and yet it seems a pleasure to him
to make my life a series of petty annoyances."

" Ah ! my boy, it is not only woman's love that is d-nipwroq
s/'ii)^, as old ^schylus calls it. There's plenty of ' unloving
love ' in the world of a masculine kind. But tell me about
Adam. Has he accepted the post ? I don't see that it can
be much more profitable than his present work, though, to
be sure, it will leave him a good deal of time on his own
hands."

" Well, I felt some doubt about it when I spoke to him,
and he seemed to hesitate at first. His objection was that
he thought he should not be able to satisfy my grandfather.
But I begged him as a personal favor to me not to let any rea-
son prevent him from accepting the place, if he really liked the
employment, and would not be giving up anything that was
more profitable to him. And he assured me he should like it
of all things : it would be a great step forward for him in busi-
ness, and it would enable him to do what he had long wished
to do — to give up working for Burge. He says he shall have
plenty of time to superintend a little business of his own,
which he and Seth will carry on, and will perhaps be able to
enlarge by degrees. So he has agreed at last, and I have
arranged that he shall dine with the large tenants to-day ; and
I mean to announce the appointment to them, and ask them
to drink Adam's health. It's a little drama I've got up in

234 ADAM BEDE.

honor of my friend Adam. He's a fine fellow, and I like the
opportunity of letting people know that I think so."

" A drama in which friend Arthur piques himself on hav-
ing a pretty part to play," said Mr. Irwine, smiling. But
when he saw Arthur color, he went on relentingly, " My part,
you know, is always that of the Old Fogy who sees nothing to
admire in the young folks. I don't like to admit that I'm
proud of my pupil when he does graceful things. But I must
play the amiable old gentleman for once, and second your
toast in honor of Adam. Has your grandfather yielded on
the other point too, and agreed to have a respectable man as
steward ? "

"Oh no," said Arthur, rising from his chair with an air of
impatience, and walking along the room with his hands in his
pockets. " He's got some project or other about letting the
Chase Farm, and bargaining for a supply of milk and butter
for the house. But I ask no questions about it — it makes me
too angry. I believe he means to do all the business himself,
and have nothing in the shape of a steward. It's amazing
what energy he has, though."

" Well, we'll go ro the ladies now," said Mr. Irwine, rising
too. " I want to tell my mother what a splendid throne you've
prepared for her under the marquee."

" Yes, and we must be going to luncheon too," said Arthur.
" It must be two o'clock, for there is the gong beginning to
SQ44id for the tenants' dinners.

CHAPTER XXIII.

DINNER-TIME.

WHEN Adam heard that he was to dine up stairs with the
large tenants, he felt rather uncomfortable at the idea of be-
ing exalted in this way above his mother and Seth, who were
to dine in the cloisters below. But Mr. Mills, the butler, as-
sured him that Captain Donnithorne had given particular
orders about it, and would be very angry if Adam was not
there.

Adam nodded, and went up to Seth, who was standing a
few yards off. " Seth, lad," he said, " the captain has sent

ADAM BEDE. 235

to say I'm to dine up stairs — he wishes it particular, Mr.
Mills says, so I suppose it 'ud be behaving ill for me not to
go. But I don't lik , sitting up above thee and mother, as if
I was better than my ov^m flesh and blood. Thee't not take
it unkind, I hope ? "

" Nay, nay, lad," said Seth, "thy honor's our honor ; and
if thee get'st respect thee'st won it by thy own deserts. The
further I see thee above me, the better, so long as thee feel'st
like a brother to me. It's because o' thy being appointed
over the woods, and it's nothing but what's right. That's a
place o' trust, and thee't above a common workman now."

" Ay," said Adam, " but nobody knows a word about it
yet. I haven't given notice to Mr. Burge about leaving him,
and I don't like to tell anybody else about it before he knows,
for he'll be a good bit hurt, I doubt. People 'uU be wonder-
ing to see me there, and they'll like enough be guessing the
reason, and asking questions, for there's been so much talk
up and down about my having the place, this last three
weeks."

" Well, thee canst say thee wast ordered to come without
being told the reason. That's the truth. And mother 'ull be
fine and joyful about it. Let's go and tell her."

Adam was not the only guest invited to come up stairs on
other grounds than the amount he contributed to the rent-
roll. There were other people in the two parishes who derived
dignity from their functions rather than from their pocket,
and of these Bartle Massey was one. His lame walk was
rather slower than usual on this warm day, so Adam lingered
behind when the bell rang for dinner, tha't he might watk up
with his old friend ; for he was a little too shy to join the
Poyser party on this public occasion. Opportunities of get-
tmg to Hetty's side would be sure to turn up in the course of
the day, and Adam contented himself with that, for he dis-
liked any risk of being "joked" about Hetty; the big, out-
spoken, fearless man was very shy and diffident as to his love-
making.

^"Well, Mester Massey," said Adam, as Bartle came up,
" I'm going to dine up stairs with vou to-day : the captain's
sent me orders."

, "*'^^'" said Bartle, pausing, with one hand on his back.
" Theti there's something in the wind — there's something in
the wind. Have you heard anything about what the old
squire means to do 1 "

"Why, yes," said Adam ; " I'll tell you what I know, be-

236 ADAAf BEDE.

cause I believe you can keep a still K)ngue in your head
if you like ; and I hope you'll not let drop a woi»d till it's
common talk, for I've particular reasons against its being
known."

" Trust to me, my boy, trust to me. I've got ho wife to
worm it out of me, and then run out and cackle it in evary-
body's hearing. If you trust a man let him be a bachelor —
let him be a bachelor."

" Well, then, it was so far settled yesterday, that I'm to
take the management o' the woods. The captain sent for me,
t' offer it me, when I was seeing to the poles and things here,
and I've agreed to't. But if anybody asks any questions up
stairs, just you take no notice, and turn the talk to something
else, and I'll be obliged to you. Now, let us go on, for we're
pretty nigh the last, I think."

" I know what to do, never fear," said Bartle, moving on.
" The news will be good sauce to my dinner. Ay, ay, my
boy, 3'ou'll get on. I'll back you for an eye at measuring, and
a head-piece for figures, against any man in this country ;
and you've had good teaching — you've had good teaching."

When they got up stairs, the question which Arthur had
left unsettled, as to who was to be president and who vice,
was still under discussion, so that Adam's entrance passed
without remark.

" It stands to sense," Mr. Casson was saying, " as old
Mr, Poyser, as is th' oldest man i' the room, should sit at top
o' the table. I wasn't butler fifteen year without learning the
rights and wrongs about dinner."

" Nay, nay," said old Martin, " I'n gi'en up to my son ;
I'm no tenant now : let my son take my place. Th' ould
foulks ha' had their turn ; they mun make way for the young
uns."

" I should ha' thought the biggest tenant had the best
right, more nor the oldest," said Luke Britton, who was not
fond of the critical Mr. Poyser ; " there's Mester Holdsworth
has more land nor anybody else on th' estate."

" Well," said Mr.' Poyser, " suppose we say the man w'
the foulest land shall sit at top ; then whoever gets th' honor,
there'll be no envying on him."

" Eh ! here's Mester Massey," said Mr. Craig, who, being
a neutral in the dispute, had no interest but in conciliation ;
" the schoolmaster ought to be able to tell you what's right.
Who's to sit at the top o' the table, Mr. Massey ? "

*' Why, the broadest man," said Bartle ; " and then he

ADAM BEDE.

237

won't take up other folks' room ; and the next broadest must
sit at bottom."

This happy mode of settling the dispute produced much
laughter — a smaller joke would have sufficed for that. Mr.
Casson, however, did not feel it compatible with his dignity
and superior knowledge to join in the laugh, until it turned
out that he was fixed on as the second broadest man. Martin
Poyser, the younger, as the broadest, was to be president,
and Mr. Casson, as the next broadest, was to be vice.

Owing to this arrangement, Adam, being, of course, at the
bottom of the table, fell under the immediate observation of
Mr. Casson, who, too much occupied with the question of pre-
cedence, had not hitherto noticed his entrance. Mr. Casson,
we have seen, considered Adam " rather lifted up and pep-
pery-like : " he thought the gentry made more fuss about this
young carpenter than was necessary ; they made no fuss
about Mr. Casson, although he had been an excellent butler
for fifteen years.

" Well, Mr. Bede, you're one o' them as mounts hup'ards
apace," he said, when Adam sat down, " You've niver dined
here before, as I remember."

" No, Mr. Casson," said Adam, in his strong voice, that
could be heard along the table, " I've never dined here before,
but I come by Captain Donnithorne's wish, and I hope it's not
disagreeable to anybody here."

" Nay, nay," said several voices at once, " we're glad ye're
come. Who's got anything to say again' it ? "

" And ye'U sing us ' Over the hills and far away,' after din-
ner, wonna ye .-' " said Mr. Chowne. " That's a song I'm un-
common fond on."

" Peeh ! " said Mr. Craig ; "it's not to be named beside
o' the Scotch tunes. I've never cared about singing myself ;
I've had something better to do. A man that's got the names
and the nature o' plants in's head isna likely to keep a hollow
place t' hold tunes in. But a second cousin o' mine, a drovier,
was a rare hand at remember/vg the Scotch tunes. He'd got
nothing else to think on,"

" The Scotch tunes ! " said Bartle Massey, contemptuously;
" I've heard enough o' the Scotch tunes to last me while I
live. They're fit for nothing but to frighten the birds with —
that's to say the English birds, for the Scotch birds may sing
Scotch for what I know. Give the lads a bagpipes instead of
a rattle, and I'll answer for it the corn '11 be safe.'

"Yes, there's folks as find a pleasure in undervallying
what they know but little about," said Mr. Craig.

£38 ADAM BEDE.

" Why, the Scotch tunes are just like a scolding, nagging
woman," Eartle went on, without deigning to notice Mr, Craig's
remark: "They go on with the same thing over and over
again, and never come to a reasonable end. Anybody 'ud
think the Scotch tunes had always been asking a question of
somebody as deaf as old Taft, and had never got an answer
yet."

Adam minded the less about sitting by Mr Casson, be-
cause this position enabled him to see Hetty, who was not far
off him at the next table Hetty, however, had not even no-
ticed his presence yet, for she was giving angry attention to
Totty, who insisted on drawing up her feet on to the bench in
antique fashion, and thereby threatened to make dusty marks
on Hetty's pink-and-white frock. No sooner were the little
fat legs pushed down than up they came again, for Totty 's
eyes were too busy in staring at the large dishes to see where
the plum-pudding was, for her to retain any consciousness of
her legs. Hetty got quite out of patience, and at last, with a
frown and pout, and gathering tears, she said,

" Oh dear, aunt, I wish you'd speak to Totty, she keeps
putting her legs up so, and messing my frock."

' What's the matter wi' the child ? She can niver please
you, said the mother. " Let her come by the side o' ine,
th(_n ; I can put up wi' her."

Adam was looking at Hetty, and saw the frown and pout,
and the dark eyes seeming to grow larger with pettish half-
gathered tears. Quiet Mary Burge, who sat near enough to
see that Hetty was cross, and that Adam's eyes were fixed on
her, thought that so sensible a man as Adam must be reflect-
ing on the small value of beauty in a woman whose temper
was bad. Mary was a good girl, not given to indulge in evil
feelings, but she said to herself that, since Hetty had a bad
temper, it was better Adam should know it. And it was quite
true that, if Hetty had been plain, she would have looked
very ugly and unamiable at the moment, and no one's moral
judgment upon her would have been in the least beguiled. But
really there was something quite charming in her pettishness ;
it looked so much more like innocent distress than ill-humor;
and the severe Adam felt no movement of disapprobation ; he
only felt a sort of am ised pity, as if he had seen a kitten set-
ling up its back, or a little: bird with its feathers ruffled. He
could not gather what was vexing her, but it was impossible
to him to feel othcrwisf^ tiKin that she was the prettiest thing
in tiie world, and that if he could have his way, nothing siiould

ADAM BEDE. 239

ever vex her any more. And presently, when Totty was gone,
she caught his eyes, and her face broke into one of its bright-
est smiles, as she nodded to him. It was a bit of flirtation ;
she knew Mary Burge was looking at them. But the smile
was like wine to Adam.

CHAPTER XXIV.

THE HEALTH-DRINKING.

When the dinner was over, and the first draughts from the
great cask of birthday ale were brought up, room was made
for the broad Mr. Poyser at the side of the table, and two
chairs were placed at the head. It had been settled very def-
initely what Mr. Poyser was to do when the young squire
should appear, and for the last five minutes he had been in a
state of abstraction, with his eyes fixed on the dark picture op-
posite, and his hands busy with the loose cash and other arti-
cles in his breeches pockets.

When the young squire entered, with Mr. Irwineby his side,
every one stood up, and this moment of homage was very
agreeable to Arthur. He liked to feel his own importance,
and, besides that, he cared a great deal for the good-will of
these people ; he was fond of thinking that they had a hearty,
special regard for him. The pleasure he felt was in his face as
he said,

" My grandfather and I hope all our friends here have en-
joyed their dinner, and find my birthday ale good. Mr. Irwine
and I are come to taste it with you, and I'm sure we shall
all like anything the better that the rector shares with us."

All eyes were now turned on Mr. Poyser, who, with his
hands still busy in his pockets, began with the deliberateness
of a slow-striking clock. " Captain, my neighbors have put it
upo' me to speak for 'em to-day, for where folks think pretty
much alike, one spokesman's as good as a score. And though
we've may happen got conlrairy ways o' thinking about a
many things — one man lays down his land one way, an' anoth-
er another — an' I'll not take it upon me to speak to no man's
farming but my own — this I'll say, as we're all o' one mind
about our young squire. We've pretty nigh all on us known

24© ADAM BEDS.

you when you war a little un, an' we've niver known anything
on you but what was good an' honorable. You speak fair an'
y' act fair, an' we're joyful when we look forrard to your being
our landlord, for we b'lieve you mean to do right by everybody,
an' 'uU make no man's bread bitter to him if you can help It.
That's what I mean, an' that's what we all mean ; an' when a
man's said what he means, he'd better stop, for tlV ale 'ull be
none the better forstannin'. An' I'll not say how we like th'
ale yit, for we warna goin' to taste it till we'd drunk your
health in it ; but the dinner was good, an' if there's anybody
hasna enjoyed it, it must be the fault of his own inside. An'
as for the rector's company, it's well known as that's welcome
t' all the parish wherever he may be ; an' I hope, an' we all
hope, as he'll live to see us old folks, an' wer children grown to
men an' women, an' your honor a family man. I ve no more to
say as concerns the present time, an' so we'll drink our young
squire's health — three times three."

Hereupon a glorious shouting, a rapping, a jingling, a clat-
tering, and a shouting, with plentiful da capo, pleasanter than
a strain of sublimest music in the ears that received such a trib-
ute for the first time. Arthur had felt a twinge of conscience
during Mr. Poyser's speech, but it was too feeble to nullify the
pleasure he felt in being praised. Did he not deserve what
was said of him on the whole ? If there was something in his
conduct that Poyser wouldn't have liked if he had known it,
why, no man' s conduct will bear too close an inspection, and
Poyser was not likely to know it ; and, after all, what had he
done ? Gone a little too far, perhaps, in flirtation, but another
man in his place would have acted much worse ; and no harm
would come — no harm should come, for the next time he was
alone with Hetty he would explain to her that she must not
think seriously of him or of what had passed. It was neces-
sary to Arthur, you perceive, to be satisfied with himself ; un-
comfortable thoughts must be got rid of by good intentions for
the future, which can be formed so rapidly that he had time to
be uncomfortable and to become easy again before Mr. Poy-
ser's slow speech was finished, and when it was time for him to
speak he was quite light-hearted.

" I thank you all, my good friends and neighbors," Arthur
said, " for the good opinion of me and the kind feelings toward
me which Mr. Poyser has been expressing on your behalf and
on his own, and it will always be my heartiest wish to deserve
them. In the course of things we may expect that, if I live, I
shall one day or other be your landlord j indeed, it is on the

DAAf BEDE.

241

ground of that expectation that my grandfather has wished me
to celebrate this day and to come among you now ; and I look
forward to this position, not merely as one of power and pleas-
ure for myself, but as a means of benefiting my neighbors. It
hardly becomes so young a man as I am to talk much about
farming to you, who are most of you so much older, and are
men of experience ; still I have interested myself a good deal
in such matters, and learned as much about them as my op-
portunities have allov/ed \ and when the course of events shall
place the estate in my hands, it will be my first desire to af-
ford my tenants all the encouragement a landlord can give
them in improving their land and trying to bring about a
better practice of husbandry. It will be my wish to be loolied
on by all my deserving tenants as their best friend, and noth-
ing would make me so happy as to be able to respect every
man on the estate, and to be respected by him in return. It
is not m.y place at present to enter into particulars ; I only
meet your good hopes concerning me by telling you that my
own hopes correspond to them — that what you expect from
me I desire to fulfill ; and I am quite of Mr. Poyser's opinion,
that when a man has said what he means he had better stop.
But the pleasure I feel in having my own health drunk by
you would not be perfect if we did not drink the health of my
grandfather, who has filled the place of both parents to me.
I will say no more until you have joined me in drinking
his health on a day when he has wished me to appear
among you as the future representative of his name and
family."

Perhaps there was no one present except Mr. Irwine who
thoroughly understood and approved Arthur's graceful mode
of proposing his grandfather's health. The farmers thought
the young squire knew well enough that they hated the old
squire, and Mrs. Poyser said " he'd better not ha' stirred a
kettle o' sour broth." The bucolic mind does not readily ap-
prehend the refinements of good taste. But the toast could
not be rejected, and when it had been drunk, Arthur said,

" I thank you, both for my grandfather and myself ; and
now there is one more thing I wish to tell you, that you may
share my pleasure about it, as I hope and believe you will.
I think there can be no man here who has not a respect, and
some of you, I am sure, have a very high regard, for my friend
Adam Bede. It is well known to every one in this neighbor-
hood that there is no man whose word can be more depended
on than his ; that whatever he undertakes to do, he does well,

243

ADAM BEDE.

and is as careful for the interests of those who employ him

as for his own. I'm proud to say that I was very fond of Adam
when I was a little boy, and I have never lost my old feeling
for him — I think that shows that I know a good fellow when
I find him. It has long been my wish that he should have
the management of the woods on the estate, which happen
to be very valuable ; not only because I think so highly of
his character, but because he has the knowledge and the skill
which tit him for the place. And I am happy to tell you that
it is my grandfather's wish too, and it is now settled that Adam
shall manage the woods — a change which I am sure will be
very much for the advantage of the estate ; and I hope you
will by and by join me in drinking his health, and in wishing
him all the prosperity in life that he deserves. But there is
a still older friend of mine than Adam Bede present, and I
need not tell you that it is Mr. I r wine. I'm sure you will
agree with me that we must drink no other person's health
until we have drunk his. I know you have all reason to love
him, but no one of his parishioners has so much reason as I.
Come, charge your glasses, and let us drink to our excellent
rector — three times three ! "

The toast was drunk with all the enthusiasm that was
wanting to the last, and it certainly was the most picturesque
moment in the scene when Mr. Irwine got up to speak, and
all the faces in the room were turned toward him. The
supefior refinement of his face was much more striking than
that of Arthur's when seen in comparison with the people
round them. Arthur's was a much commoner British face,
and the splendor of his new-fashioned clothes was more akin
to the young farmer's taste in costume than Mr. Irwine's
powder, and the well-brushed but well-worn black, which
seemed to be his chosen suit for great occasions, for he had
the mysterious secret of never wearing a new-looking coat.

" This is not the first time, by a great many," he said,
" that I have had to thank my parishioners for giving me
tokens of their good-will, but neighborly kindness is among
those things that are the more precious the older they get.
Indeed, our pleasant meeting to-day is a proof that when
what is good comes of age and is likely to live there is reason
for rejoicing, and the relation between us as clergymen and
parishioners came of age two years ago, for it is three-and-
twenty years since I first came among you, and I see some
tall, fine-looking young men here, as well as some blooming
young women, that were far from looking as pleasantly at me

ADAM BEDS. 243

when I christened them, as I am happy to see them looking
now. But I'm sure you will not wonder when I say, that
among all those young men, the one in whom I have the
strongest interest is my friend Mr. Arthur Uonnithorne, for
whom you have just expressed your regard. I had the pleas-
ure of being his tutor for several years, and have naturally
had opportunities of knowing him intimately which cannot
have occurred to anyone else present ; and I have some pride
as well as pleasure in assuring you that I share your high
hopes concerning him, and your confidence in his possession
of those qualities which will make him an excellent landlord
when the time shall come for him to take that important posi-
tion among you. We feel alike on most matters on which a
man who is getting toward fifty can feel in common with a
young man of one-and-twenty, and he has just been express-
ing a feeling which I share' very heartily, and I would not
willingly omit the opportunity of saying so.' That feeling is his
value and respect for Adam Bede. People in a high station
are of course more thought of and talked about, and have
their virtues more praised, than those whose lives are passed
in humble, every-day work ; but every sensible man knows
how necessary that, humble, every-day work is, and how im-
portant it is to us that it should be done well. And I agree
with my friend Mr. Arthur Donnithorne in feeling that when
a man whose duty lies in that sort of work shows a character
which would make him an example in any station, his merit
should be acknowledged. He is one of those to whom honor
is due, and his friends should delight to honor him. I know
Adam Bede well — I know what he is as a workman, and
what he has been as a son and brother — and I am saying the
simplest truth when I say that I respect him as much as I re-
spect any man living. But I am not speaking to you about a
stranger ; some of you are his intimate friends, and I believe
there is not one here who does not know enough of him to
join heartily in drinking his health."

As Mr. Irwine paused Arthur jumped up, and, filling his
glass, said, " A bumper to Adam Bede, and may he live to
have sons as faithful and clever as himself ! "

_ No hearer, not even Bartle Massey, was so delighted with
this toast as Mr. Poyser ; "tough work" as his first speech
had been, he would have started up to make another if he had
not known the extreme irregularity of such a course. As it
was, he found an outlet for his feeling in drinking his ale un-
usually fast, and setting down his glass with a swing of his

244 ADAM BEDE.

arm and a determined rap. If Jonathan Burge and a few
others felt less comfortable on the occasion, they tried their
best to look contented, and so the toast was drunk with a
good-will apparently unanimous.

Adam was rather paler than usual when he got up to thank
his friends. He was a good deal moved by this public tribute
— very naturally, for he was in the presence of all his little
world, and it was uniting to do him honor. But he felt no
shyness about speaking, not being troubled with small vanity
or lack of words ; he looked neither awkward nor embarrassed,
but stood in his usual firm, upright attitude, with his head
thrown a little backward and his hands perfectly still, in that
rough dignity which is peculiar to intelligent, honest, well-built
workmen, who are never wondering what is their business in
the world.

" I'm quite taken by surprise," he said. " I didn't expect
anything o' this sort, for it's a good deal more than my wages.
But I've the more reason to be grateful to you, captain, and
to you, Mr. Irwine, and to all my friends here, who've drunk
ray health, and wished me well. It 'ud be nonsense for me
to be saying, I don't at all deserve th' opinion you have of
me ; that 'ud be poor thanks to you, to say that you've known
me all these years, and yet haven't sense enough to find out
a great deal o' truth about me. You think, if I undertake to
do a bit o' work, I'll do it well, be my pay big or little — and
that's true. I'd be ashamed to stand before you here if it
wasna true. But it seems to me, that's a man's plain duty,
and nothing to be conceited about, and it's pretty clear to me
as I've never done more than my duty ; for let us do what we
will, it's only making use o' the sperrit and the powers that
ha' been given to us. And so this kind-ness o' yours, I'm sure,
is no debt you owe me, but a free gift, and as such I accept
it and am thankful And as to this new employment I've
taken in hand, I'll only say that I took it at Captain Donni-
thorne's desire, and that I'll try to fultill his expectations. I'd
wish for no better lot than to work under him, and to know
that while I wa gettin^ my own bread I was taking care of
his int'rests For I believe he's one o' those gentlemen as
wishes to do the righ thing, and to leave the world a bit better
than he found ic, which it's my belief every man may do,
whether he's gentl or simple, whether he sets a good bit o'
work gomg and finds tht money, or whether he does the work
with his own hands There's no occasion for me to say any

ADAM BEDE.

245

more about what I feel toward him : I hope to show it through
the rest o' my life in my actions."

There were various opinions about Adam's speech ; some
of the women whispered that he didn't show himself thankful
enough, and seemed to speak as proud as could be ; but most
of the men were of opinion that nobody could speak more
straightfor'ard, and that Adam was as fine a chap as need to
be. While such observations were being buzzed about, min-
gled with wonderings as to what the old squire meant to do
for a bailiff, and whether he was going to have a steward, the
two gentlemen had risen, and were walking round the table
where the wives and children sat. There was none of the
strong ale here, of course, but wine and dessert — sparkling
gooseberry for the young ones, and some good sherry for the
mothers. Mrs. Poyser was at the head of this table, and
Totty was now seated in her lap, bending her small nose deep
down into a wine-glass in search of the nuts floating there.

" How do you do, Mrs. Poyser "i " said Arthur. " Weren't
you pleased to hear your husband make such a good speech
to-day ? "

" Oh, sir, the men are mostly so tongue-tied — you're forced
partly to guess what they mean, as you do wi' the dumb crea-
tures."

" What ! you think you could have made it better for
him ? " said Mr. Irvvine, laughing.

"Well, sir, when I want to say anything, I can mostly
find words to say it in, thank God. Not as I'm a-finding faut
wi' my husband, for, if he's a man o' few words, what he says
he'll stand to."

" I'm sure I never saw a prettier party than this," Arthur
said, looking round at the apple-cheeked children. " My aunt
and the Miss Irwines will come up and see you presently.
They were afraid of the noise of the toasts, but it would be
a shame for them not to see you at table."

He walked on, speaking to the mothers and patting the
children, while Mr. Irwine satisfied himself with standing still,
nnd nodding at a distance, that no one's attention might be
disturbed from the young squire, the hero of the day. i\.r-
thur did not venture to stop near Hetty, but merely bowed to
her as he passed along the opposite side. The foolish child
felt her heart swelling with discontent ; for what woman was
ever satisfied with apparent neglect, even when she knows it
to be the mask of love ? Hetty thought this was going to be
the most miserable day she had had for a long while ; a mo-

246 ADAM EEDE.

ment of cliil! daylight and reality came across her dream ;
Arthur, who had seemed so near lo l)er only a few hours be-
fore, was separated from her, as the hero nt a preat proces-
sion is separated from a small outsider in the crowd.

CHAPTER XXV.

THE GAMES.

The great dance was not to begin until eight o'clock ; but
for any lads and lasses who liked to dance on the shady grass
before then, there was music always at hand ; for was not the
band of the Benefit Club capable of playing excellent jigs,
reels, and hornpipes ? And besides this, there was a grand
band hired from llosseter, who, with their wonderful wind-in-
struments and puffed-out cheeks, were themselves a delightful
show to the small boys and girls. To say nothing of Joshua
Rann's fiddle, which, by an act of generous forethought, he
had provided himself with, in case any one should be of suf-
ficiently pure taste to prefer dancing to a solo on that instru-
ment.

Meantime, when the sun had moved off the great open
space in front of the house, the games began. There were of
course well-soaped poles to be climbed by the boys and youths,
races to be run by the old women, races to be run in sacks,
heavy weights to be lifted by the strong men, and a long
list of challenges to such ambitious attempts as that of walk-
ing as many yards as possible on one leg — feats in which it
was generally remarked that Wiry Ben, being " the lissom'st,
springest fellow i' the country," was sure to be preeminent.
To crown all, there was to be a donkey race — that sublimest
of all races, conducted on the grand socialistic idea of every-
body encouraging everybody else's donkey, and the sorriest
donkey winning.

And soon after four o'clock, splendid old Mrs. Irwine, in
her damask satin and jewels and black lace, was led out by
Arthur, followed by the whole family part}', to her raised seat
under the striped marquee, where she was to give out the
prizes to the victors. Staid, formal Miss Lydia had requested
to resign that queenly office to the royal old lady, and Arthur

ADAM BEBj:.. 247

was pleased with this opportunity of gratifying his godmother's
taste for stateliness. Old Mr. Donnithorne, the delicately-
clean, finely-scented, withered old man, led out Miss Irwine,
with his air of punctilious, acid politeness ; Mr. Gawame
brought Miss Lydia, looking neutral and stiff in an elegant
peach-blossom silk ; and Mr. Irwine came last with his pale
sister Anne. No other friend of the family, beside Mr. Ga-
waine, was invited to-day ; there was to be a grand dinner for
the neighboring gentry on the morrow, but to-day all the forces
were required for the entertainment of the tenants.

There was a sunk fence in front of the marquee, dividing
the lawn from the park, but a temporary bridge had been
made for the passage of the victors, and the groups of people
standing, or seated here and there on benches, stretched on
each side of the open space from the white marquees up to
the sunk fence.

" Upon my word it's a pretty sight," said the old lady, in
her deep voice, when she was seated, and looked around on
the bright scene with its dark green background ; " and it's
the last fete day I'm likely to see, unless you make haste and
get married, Arthur. But take care you get a charming bride,
else I would rather die without seeing her."

," ^°" .^''^ ^° terribly fastidious, godmother," said Arthur,
•''I'm afraid I should never satisfy you with my choice."

" Well, I won't forgive you if she's not handsome. I can't
be put off with amiability, which is always the excuse people
are making for the existence of plain people. And she must
not be silly ; that will never do, because you'll want managing,
and a silly woman can't manage you. Who is that tall young
man, Dauphin, with the mild face .? There— standing without
his hat, and taking such care of that tall old woman by the
side of him — his mother, of course. I like to see that."

" What, don't you know him, mother ? " said Mr. Irwine.
" That is Seth Bede, Adam's brother— a Methodist, but a very
good fellow. Poor Seth has looked rather down-hearted of
late ; I thought it was because of his father's dying in that
sad way ; but Joshua Rann tells me he wanted to marry that
sweet little Methodist preacher who was here about a month
ago, and I suppose she refused him."

" Ah ! I remember hearing about her ; but there are no
end of people here that I don't know, for they're grown up and
altered so since I used to go about."

" What excellent sight you have ! " said old Air. Donni-
tbome, who was holding a double glass up to hi

248 ADAM BEDE.

Bee the expression of that young man's face so far off. His
face is nothing but a pale blurred spot to me. But 1 fancy I
have the advantage or you when we come to look close. J
can read small prnit wiihout spectacles."

" Ah ! my dear sir, you began with being very near-sighted,
and those near-sighted eyes always wear the best, i want
very strong spectacles to read witn, but then I think my eyes
get better and better for things at a distance. 1 suppose if J
could live another fifty years, I should be blind to everything
that wasn't out of other people's sight, like a man who stands
in a well, and sees nothing but the stars."

" See," said Arthur, '" the old women are ready to set out
on their race now. Which do you bet on, Gawaine ? "

"The long-legged one, unless they are going to have sev-
eral heats, and then the little wiry one may win."

" There are the Poysers, mother, not far off on the right
hand," said Miss Irwine. '* Mrs. Poyser is looking at you.
Do take notice of her."

" To be sure I will," said the old lady, giving a gracious
bow to Mrs. Poyser. " A woman who sends me such excel-
lent cream cheese is not to be neglected. Bless me ! what a
fat child that is she is holding on her knee ! But who is that
pretty girl with dark eyes ? "

'• That is Hetty Sorrel," said Miss Lydia Donnithorne,
" Martin Poyser's niece — a very likely young person, and
well-looking too. My maid has taught her fine needle-work,
and she has mended some lace of mine very respectably indeed
— very respectably."

" Why, she has lived with the Poysers six or seven years,
mother; you must have seen her," said Miss Irwine.

" No, I've never seen her, child ; at least, not as she is
now," said Mrs. Irwine, continuing to look at Hetty. "Well-
looking, indeed ! she's a perfect beauty ! I've never seen
anything so pretty since my young days. What a pity such
beauty as that should be thrown away among the farmers,
when it's wanted so terribly among the good fanulies without
fortune ! I dare sa}', now, she'll marry a man who'd have
thought her just as pretty if she had had round eyes and red
hair."

Arthur dared not turn his eyes toward Hetty, while Mrs.
Irwine was speaking of her. He feigned not to hear, and to
be occupied with something on the opposite side. But he saw
her, plainly enough without looking; saw her in heightened
beauty, because he hea-rd her beauty praised — for other men's

ADAM BEri£. 249

opinion, you know, was like a native climate to Arthur's feel-
ings : it was the air on which they thrived the best and grew
strong. Yes ! she was enough to turn any man's head ; any
man in his place would have done and felt the same. And to
give her up after all, as he was determined to do, would be an
act that he should always look back upon with pride.

" No, mother," said Mr, Irwine, replying to her last v/ords,
" I can't agree with you there. The common people are not
quite so stupid as you imagine. The commonest man, who
has his ounce of sense and feeling, is conscious of the differ-
ence between a lovely, delicate woman and a coarse one.
Even a dog feels a difference in their presence. The man may
be no better able than the dog to explain the influence the
more refined beauty has on him, but he feels it."

" Bless me, Dauphin, what does an old bachelor like you
know about it ? "

" Oh, that is one of the matters in which old bachelors are
wiser than married men, because they have time for more gen-
eral contemplation. Your fine critic of women must never
shackle his judgment by calling one woman his own ; but, as
an example of what I was saying, that pretty Methodist
preacher I mentioned just now told me that she had preached
to the roughest miners, and had never been treated with any-
thing but the utmost respect and kindness by them. The
reason is — though she doesn't know it — that there's so much
tenderness, refinement, and purity about her. Such a woman
as that brings with her ' airs from heaven ' that the coarsest
fellow is not insensible to."

" Here's a delicate bit of womanhood, or girlhood, coming
to receive a prize, I suppose," said Mr. Gawaine. " She must
be one of the racers in the sacks, who had set off before we
came."

The "bit of womanhood" was our old acquaintance,
Bessy Cranage, otherwise Chad's Bess, whose large red cheeks
and blowsy person had undergone an exaggeration of color,
which, if she had happened to be a heavenly body, would have
made her sublime. Bessy, I am sorry to say, had taken to her
earrings again since Dinah's departure, and was otherwise
decked out in such small finery as she could muster. Any
one who could have looked into poor Bessy's heart would
have seen a striking resemblance between her little hopes and
anxieties and Hetty's. The advantage, perhaps, would have
been on Bessy's side in the matter of feeling. But then, you
see, they were so very difEerent outside ! You would have

25© JIDAM BEDE.

been inclined to box Bessy's ears, and you would have longed
to kiss Hetty.

Bessy had been tempted to run the arduous race, partly
from mere hoidenish gayety, partly because of the prize.
Some one had said there were to be cloaks and other nice
clothes for prizes, and she approached the marquee, fanning
herself with her handkerchief, but with exultation sparkling in
her round eyes.

" Here is the prize for the first sack-race," said Miss
Lydia, taking a large parcel from the table where the prizes
were laid, and giving it to Mrs. Irwine before Bessy came up ;
" an excellent grogram gown and a piece of flannel."

" You didn't think the winner was to be so young, I sup-
pose, aunt ? " said Arthur. " Couldn't you find something
else for this girl, and save that grim-looking gown for one of
the older women ? "

" I have bought nothing but what is useful and substan-
tial," said Miss Lydia, adjusting her own lace ; " I should not
think of encouraging a love of finery in young women of that
class. I have a scarlet cloak, but that is for the old woman
who wins."

This speech of Miss Lydia's produced rather a mocking
expression in Mrs. Irwine's face as she looked at Arthur,
while Bessy came up and dropped a series of courtesies.

" This is Bessy Cranage, mother," said Mr. Irwine, kindly,
" Chad Cranage's daughter. You remember Chad Cranage,
the blacksmith ?"

" Yes, to be sure," said Mrs. Irwine. " Well, Bessy, here
is your prize — excellent warm things for winter. I'm sure you
have had hard work to win them this warm day."

Bessy's lip fell as she saw the ugly, heavy gown, which
felt so hot and disagreeable, too, on this July day, and was
such a great ugly thing to carry. She dropped her courtesies
again, without looking up, and with a growing tremulousness
about the corners of her mouth, and then turned away.

" Poor girl," said Arthur ; " I think she's disappointed. I
wish it had been something more to her taste."

" She's a bold-looking young person," observed Miss Lydia.
" Not at all one I should like to encourage."

Arthur silently resolved that he would make Bessy a
present of money before the day was over, that she might buy
something more to her mind ; but she, not aware of the con-
solation in store for her, turned out of the open space, where
she was visible from the marquee, and throwing down the

ADAM BEDE. 2CI

odious bundle under a tree, began to cry — very much tittered
at the while by the small boys. In this situation she was de-
scried by her discreet matronly cousin, who lost no time in
coming up, having just given the baby into her husband's
charge.

" What's the matter wi' ye t " said Bess the matron, taking
up the bundle and examining it, " Ye'n sweltered yoursen, I
reckon, running that fool's race. An' here, they'n gi'en you
lots o' good grogram an' flannel, as should ha' been gi'en by
good rights to them as had the sense to keep away from' such
foolery. Ye might spare me a bit o' this grogram to make
clothes for the lad — ye war ne'er ill-natured, Bess ; I ne'er
said that on ye."

" Ye may take it all, for what I care," said Bess the maiden,
with a pettish movement, beginning to wipe away her tears
and recover herself.

Well, I could do wi't, if so be ye want to get rid on't,"
said the disinterested cousin, walking quickly away with the
bundle, lest Chad's Bess should change her mind.

_ But the bonny-cheeked lass was blest with an elasticity of
spirits that secured her from any rankling grief ; and by the
time the grand climax of the donkey race came on, her disap-
pointment was entirely lost in the delightful excitement of at-
tempting to stimulate the last donkey by hisses, while the
boys applied the argument of sticks. But the strenf^th of the
donkey mind lies in adopting a course inversely as the
arguments urged, which, well considered, requires as o-reat a
mental force as the direct sequence ; and the present donkey
proved the first-rate order of his intelligence by comino- to a
dead standstill just when the blows were thickest. Great was
the shoutmg of the crowd, radiant the grinning of Bill Downes
the stone-sawyer and the fortunate rider of this superior
beast, which stood calm and stiff-legged in the midst of its
triumph.

Arthur himself had provided the prizes for the men, and
Bil vvas made happy with a splendid pocket-knife, supplied
with blades and gimlets enough to make a man at home on a
desert island. He had hardly returned from the marquee
with the prize in his hand, when it began to be understood
that Wiry Ben proposed to amuse the company, before the
gentry went to dinner, with an impromptu and gratuitous per-
tormance— namely, a hornpipe, the main idea of which was
doubtless borrowed ; but this was to be developed by the
dancer m so peculiar and complex a manner that no one

2S2

AMAM BEDE.

could deny him the praise of originality. Wiry Ben's pride in
his dancing — an accomplishment productive of great effect at
the yearly Wake — had needed only slightly elevating by an
extra quantity of good ale, to convince him that the gentry
would be very much struck with his performance of the horn-
pipe ; and he had been decidedly encouraged in this idea by
Joshua Rann, who observed that it was nothing but right to do
something to please the young squire, in return for what he
had done for them. You will be the less surprised at this
opinion in so grave a personage when you learn that Ben had
requested Mr. Rann to accompany him on the fiddle, and
Joshua felt quite sure that though there might not be much in
the dancing, the music would make up for it. Adam Bede,
who was present in one of the large marquees, where the plan
was being discussed, told Ben he had better not make a fool
of himself — a remark which at once fixed Ben's determina-
tion : he was not going to let anything alone because Adam
Bede turned up his nose at it.

" What's this, what's this ? " said old Mr. Donnithorne.
** Is it something you've arranged, Arthur .'' Here's the clerk
coming with his fiddle, and a smart fellow with a nosegay in
his button-hole."

" No," said Arthur ; "I know nothing about it. By Jove,
he's going to dance ! It's one of the carpenters — I forget his
name at this moment."

" It's Ben Cranage — Wiry Ben, they call him," said Mr.
Irwine ; "rather a loose fish, I think. Anne, my dear, I see
that liddle-scraping is too much for you : you're getting
tired. Let me take you in now, that you may rest till
dinner."

Miss Anne rose assentingly, and the good brother took
her away, while Joshua's preliminary scrapings burst into the
"White Cockade," from which he intended to pass to a va-
riety of tunes, by a series of transitions which his good ear
really taught him to execute with some skill. It would have
been an exasperating fact to him. if he had known it, that
the general attention was too thoroughly absorbed by Ben's
dancing for any one to give much heed to the music.

Have you ever seen a real English rustic perform a solo
dance ? Perhaps you have only seen a ballet rustic, smiling
like a merry countryman in crockery, with graceful turns of
the haunch and insinuating movements of the head. This is
as much like the real thing as the " Bird Waltz " is like the
song of birds. Wiry Ben never smiled j he looked as serious

ADAM BEDE.

253

as a dancing monkey — as serious as if he had oeen an ex-
perimental philosopher ascertaining in his own person the
amount of shaking and the varieties of angularity that could
be given to the human limbs.

To make amends for the abundant laughter in the striped
marquee, Arthur clapped his hands continually and cried
" Bravo ! " But Ben had one admirer whose eyes followed
his movements with a fervid gravity that equalled his own.
It was Martin Poyser, who was seated on a bench, with
Tommy between his legs.

" What dost think o' that ? " he said to his wife. " He
goes as pat to the music as if he was made o' clock-work. I
used to be a pretty good un at dancing myself when I was
lighter, but I could niver ha' hit it just to the hair like that."

" It's little matter what his limbs are, to my thinking," re-
plied Mrs. Poyser. '• He's empty enough i' the upper story,
or he'd niver come jigging an' stamping i' that way, like a
mad grasshopper, for the gentry to look at him. They're fit to
die wi' laughing, I can see."

"Well, well, so much the better, it amuses 'em," said Mr.
Poyser, who did not easily take an irritable view of things.
" But they're going away now, t' have their dinner, I reckon.
We'll move about a bit, shall we ? and see what Adam Bede's
doing. He's got to look after the drinking and things ; I doubt
he hasna had much fun."

CHAPTER XXVI.

THE DANCE.

Arthur had chosen the entrance-hall for the ball-room ;
very wisely, for no other room could have been so airy, or
would have had the advantage of the wide doors opening into
the garden, as well as a ready entrance into the other rooms.
To be sure a stone floor was not the pleasantest to dance on,
but then, most of the dancers had known what it was to enjoy
a Christmas dance on kitchen quarries. It was one of those
entrance-halls which make the surrounding rooms look like
closets, with stucco angels, trumpets, and flower-wreaths on
the lofty ceiling, and great medallions of miscellaneous heroes
on the walls, alternating with statues in niches. Just the
sort of place to be ornamcn:ed well with green boughs, and

«54

AVAM BEDE.

Mr. Craig had been proud to show his taste and his hot-house
plants on the occasion. The broad steps of the stone staircase
were covered with cushions to serve as seats for the children,
who were to stay till half-past nine with the servant-maids to
see the dancing ; and as this dance was confined to the chief
tenants, there was abundant room for every one. The lights
were charmingly disposed in colored paper lamps, high up
among green boughs, and the farmers' wives and daughters,
as they peeped in, believed no scene could be more splendid \
they knew now quite well in what sort of rooms the king and
queen lived, and their thoughts glanced with some pity to-
ward cousins and acquaintances who had not this fine oppor-
tunity of knowing how things went on in the great world.
The lamps were already lit, though the sun had not long set,
and there was that calm light out of doors in which we seem
to see all objects more distinctly than in the broad day.

It was a pretty scene outside the house : the farmers and
their families were moving about the lawn, among the flowers
and shrubs, or along the broad straight road leading from
the east front, where a carpet of mossy grass spread on each
side studded here and there with a dark flat-boughed cedar,
or a grand pyramidal fir sweeping the ground with its branches,
all tipped with a fringe of paler green. The groups of cot-
tagers in the park were gradually diminishing, the young ones
being attracted toward the lights that were beginning to gleam
from the windows of the gallery in the abbey, which was to be
their dancing-room, and some of the sober elder ones thinking
it time to go home quietly. One of these was Lisbeth Bede,
and Seth went with her, not from filial attention only, for his
conscience would not let him join in dancing. It had been
rather a melancholy day to Seth ; Dinah had never been more
constantly present with him than in this scene, where every-
thing was so unlike her. He saw her all the more vividly after
looking at the tJioughtless faces and gay-colored dresses of
the young women — just as one feels the beauty and the great-
ness of a pictured Madonna the more when it has been for a
moment screened from us by a vulgar head in a bonnet. But
this presence of Dinah in his mind only helped him to bear
the better with his mother's mood, which had been becoming
more and more querulous for the last hour. Poor Lisbeth was
suffering from a conflict of feelings. Her joy and pride in
the honor paid to her darling son Adam was beginning to be
worsted in the conflict with the jealousy and fretfulness which
had revived when Adam came to tell her that Captain Donni-

ADAM BEDS. 255

thorne desired him to join the dancers in the hall. Adam
was getting more and more out of her reach ; she wished all
the old troubles back again, for then it mattered more to Adam
what his mother said and did.

"Eh! it's fine talkin' o' dancin'," she said; "an' thy
father not a five week in's grave. An' I wish I war there
too, i'stid o' bein' left to take up merrier folks 's room above
ground."

" Nay, don't look at it i' that way, mother," said Adam,
who was determined to be gentle to her to-day. " I don't
mean to dance— I shall only look on. And since the captain
wishes me to be there, it 'ud look as if I thought I knew
better than him, to say e'd rather not stay. And thee know'st
how he's behaved to me to-day."

" Eh ! thee't do as thee lik'st, for thy old mother's got no
right t' hinder thee. She's nought but the old husk, and
thee'st slipped away from her like the ripe nut."

"Well, mother," said Adam, "I'll go and tell the captain
as It hurts thy feelings for me to stay, and I'd rather go home
upo' that account ; he won't take it ill then, I dare say, and
I'm willing." He said this with some effort, for he really
longed to be near Hetty this evening.

"Nay, nay, I wonna ha' thee do that— the young squire 'ull
be^ angered. Go an' do what thee't ordered to do, an' me
an' Seth 'ull go whome. I know it's a grit honor for thee to
be so looked on — an' who's prouder on it nor thy mother.?
Hadna she the cumber o' rearin' thee an' doin' for thee all
these 'ears 'i "

"Well, good-by, then, mother— good-by, lad— remember
Gyp when you get home," said Adam, turning away toward
the gate of the pleasure-grounds, where he hoped he might be
able to join the Poysers, for he had been so occupied through-
out the afternoon that he had had no time to speak to Hetly.
His -eyes soon detected a distant group, which he knew to be
the right one, returning to the house along the broad gravel
road, and he hastened on to meet them.

" Why, Adam, I'm glad to get sight on y' again," said Mr.
Poyser, who was carrying Totty on his arm. " You're going
t' have a bit o' fun, I hope, now your work's all done. And
here's Hetty has promised no end o' partners, an' I've just
been askin' her if she'd agreed to dance wi' you, an' she says

" Well, I didn't think o' dancing to-night," said Adam, al-
ready tempted to change his mind, as he looked at Hetty.

2^6 ADAM BEDE.

" Nonsense ! " said Mr. Poyser. " Why, everybody's goin'
to dance to-night, all but th' old squire and Mrs. Irwine.
Mrs. Best's been tellin' us as Miss Lyddy and Miss Irwine 'ull
dance, an' the young squire 'ull pick my wife for his furst
partner, t' open the ball ; so she'll be forced to dance, though
she's laid by ever sin' the Christmas afore the little un was
born. You canna for shame stand still, Adam, an' you a fine
young fellow, and can dance as well as anybody."

" Nay, nay," said Mrs. Poyser, "it 'ud be unbecomin'. I
know the dancin's nonsense ; but if you stick at everything
because it's nonsense, you wonna go far i' this life. When
your broth's ready made for you, you mun swallow the thick-
enin' or else let the broth alone."

" Then if Hetty 'ull dance with me," said Adam, yielding
either to Mrs. Poyser's argument or to something else, " I'll
dance whichever dance she's free."

"I've got no partner for the fourth dance," said Hetty;
" I'll dance that with you, if you like."

" Ah ! " said Mr. Poyser, " but you mun dance the first
dance, Adam, else it'll look partic'ler. There's plenty o' nice
partners to pick an' choose from, an' it's hard for the gells
when the men stan' by and don't ask 'em."

Adam felt the justice of Mr. Poyser's observation : it would
not do for him to dance with no one beside Hetty ; and re-
membering that Jonathan Purge had some reason to feel hurt
to-day, he resolved to ask Miss Mary to dance with him the
first dance, if she had no other partner.

" There's the big clock strikin' eight," said Mr. Poyser ;
" we must make haste in now, else the squire and the ladies
'ull be in afore us, an' that wouldna look well."

When they had entered the hall, and the three children un-
der Molly's charge had been seated on the stairs, the folding-
doors of the drawing-room were thrown open, and Arthur en-
tered in his regimentals, leading Mrs. Irwine to a carpet-cov-
ered dais ornamented with hot-house plants, where she and
Miss Anne were to be seated with old Mr. Donnithorne, that
they might look on at the dancing, like kings and queens in
the plays. Arthur had put on his uniform to please the tenants,
he said, who thought as much of his militia dignity as if it had
been an elevation to the premiership. He had not the least
objection to gratify them in that way : his uniform was very
advantageous to his figure.

The old squire, before sitting down, walked round the hall
to greet the tenants and make polite speeches to the wives ;
he was always polite,''b""- ^^'* tarmers had found out, after

ADAM BEDE.

257

long puzzling, that this polish was one of the signs of hard-
ness. It was observed that he gave his most elaborate civiUty
to Mrs. Poyser to-night, inquiring particularly about her health,
recommending her to strengthen herself with cold water as he
did, and avoid all drugs. Mrs. Poyser courtesied and thanked
him with great self-command, but when he had passed on, she
whispered to her husband, " I'll lay my life he's brewin' some
nasty turn against us. Old Harry doesna wag his tail so for
nothin'." Mr. Poyser had no time to answer, for now Arthur
came up and saicl, " Mrs, Poyser, I'm come to request the
favor of your hand for the first dance ; and Mr. Poyser you
must let me take you to my aunt, for she claims you as her
partner."

The wife's pale cheek flushed with a nervous sense of un-
wonted honor, as Arthur led her to the top of the room ; but
Mr. Poyser, to whom an extra glass had restored his youthful
confidence in his good looks and good dancing, walked along
with them quite proudly, secretly flattering himself that Miss
Lydia had never had a partner in her life who could lift her
off the ground as he would. In order to balance the honors
given to the two parishes, Miss Irwine danced with Luke
Britton, the largest Broxton farmer, and Mr. Gawaine led out
Mrs. Britton. Mr. Irwine, after seating his sister Anne, had
gone to the Abbey gallery, as he had agreed with Arthur be-
forehand, to see how the merriment of the cottagers was pros-
pering. Meanwhile, all the less distinguished couples had
taken their places : Hetty was led out by the inevitable Mr.
Craig, and Mary Burge by Adam ; and now the music struck
up, and the glorious country dance, best of all dances, began.

Pity it was not a boarded floor ! Then the rhythmic stamp-
ing of the thick shoes would have been better than any drums.
That merry stamping, that gracious nodding of the head, that
waving bestowal of the hand — where can we see them now ?
That simple dancing of well-covered matrons, laying aside for
an hour the cares of house and dairy, remembering but not
affecting youth, not jealous but proud of the young maidens
by their side — that holiday sprightliness of portly husbands
paying little compliments to their wives, as if their courting days
were come again — those lads and lasses a little confused and
awkward with their partners, having nothing to say — it would
be a pleasant variety to see all that sometimes, instead of low
dresses and large skirts, and scanning glances exploring cos-
tumes, and languid men in lackered boots smiling with double
meaning.

258 ADAM BEDS.

There was but one thing to mar Martin Peyser's pleasure
in this dance ; it was, that he was always in close contact
with Luke Britton, that slovenly farmer. He thought of throw-
ing a little glazed coldness into his eye in the crossing of
hands ; but then, as Miss Irwine was opposite to him instead
of the offensive Luke, he might freeze the wrong person.
So he gave his face up to hilarity, unchilled by moral judg-
ments.

How Hetty's heart beat as Arthur approached her ! He
had hardly looked at her to-day ; now he must take her hand.
Would he press it ? would he look at her 1 She thought she
Bhould cry if he gave her no sign of feeling. Now he was there
• — he had taken her hand — yes, he was pressing it. Hetty
turned pale as she looked up to him for an instant and met iiis
eyes before the dance carried him away. That pale look came
upon Arthur like the beginning of a dull pain, whicli clung to
him, though he must dance and smile and joke all the same.
Hetty would look so when he told her what he had to tell
her ; and he should never be able to bear it — he should be a
fool and give way again. Hetty's look did not really mean so
much as he thought ; it was only the sign of a struggle between
the desire for him to notice her, and the dread lest she should
betray the desire to others. But Hetty's face had a language
that transcended her feelings. There are faces which nature
charges with a meaning and pathos not belonging to the single
human soul that flutters beneath them, but speaking the joys
and sorrows of foregone generations — eyes that tell of deep
love which doubtless has been and is somewhere, but not
paired with these eyes — perhaps paired with pale eyes that
can say nothing; just as a national language may be instinct
with poetry unfelt by the lips that use it. That look of Hetty's
oppressed Arthur with a dread which yet had something of a
terrible unconfessed delight in it, that she loved him too well.
There was a hard task before him, for at that moment he felt
he would have given up three years of his youth for the hap-
piness of abandoning himself without remorse to his passion
for Hetty.

These were the incongruous thoughts in his mind as he
led Mrs. Poyser, who was panting with fatigue, and secretly
resolving that neither judge nor jury should force her to dance
another dance, to take a quiet rest in the dining-room, where
supper w:is laid out for the guests to come and take it as they
chose.

♦'I 've desired Hetty to remember as she's got to dance

ADAM BEDE.

259

wi' you, sir," said the good, innocent woman ; " for she's so
thoughtless, she'd be Hke enough to go and engage herself
for ivery dance. So I told her not to promise too many."

" Thank you, Mrs. Poyser," said Arthur, not without a
twinge. " Now sit down in this comfortable chair, and here
is Mills ready to give you what you would like best."

He hurried away to seek another matronly partner, for
due honor must be paid to the married women before he asked
any of the young ones ; and the country dances, and the
stamping, and the gracious nodding, and the waving of hands,
went on joyously.

At last the time had come for the fourth dance — longed
for by the strong, grave Adam, as if he had been a delicate-
handed youth of eighteen ; for we are all very much alike
when we are in our first love ; and Adam had hardly ever
touched Hetty's hand for more than a transient greeting — had
never danced with her but once before. His eyes had fol-
lowed her eagerly to-night in spite of himself, and had taken in
deeper draughts of love. He thought she behaved so prettily,
so quietly ; she did not seem to be flirting at all ; she smiled
less than usual ; there was almost a sweet sadness about her.
"God bless her! "he said, inwardly; "I'd make her life a
happy un if a strong arm to work for her and a heart to love
her could do it."

And then there stole over him delicious thoughts of com-
ing home from work, and drawing Hetty to his side, and
feeling her cheek softly pressed against his, till he forgot
where he was, and the music and the tread of her feet might
have been the falling of rain and the roaring of the wind, for
what he knew.

But now the third dance was ended, and he might go up
to her and claim her hand. She was at the far end of the
hall near the staircase, whispering with Molly, who had just
given the sleeping Totty into her arms before running to fetch
shawls and bonnets from the landing. Mrs. Poyser had taken
the two boys away into the dining-room to give them some
cake before they went home in the cart with grandfather, and
Molly was to follow as fast as possible.

" Let me hold her," said Adam, as Molly turned up stairs 5
" the children are so heavy when they're asleep."

Hetty was glad of the relief, for to hold Totty in her arms,
standing, was not at all a pleasant variety to her ; but this
second transfer had the unfortunate effect of rousing Totty,
who was not behind any child of her age in peevishness at an

26o ADAM BEDE.

unseasonable awaking. While Hetty was in the act of plac-
ing her in Adam's arms, and had not yet withdrawn her own,
Totty op n;d her eyes, and forthwith fought cut with her left
fist at Adam's arm, and with her right caught at the string of
brown beads round Hetty's neck. The locket leaped out
from her frock, and the next moment the string was broken,
and Hetty, helpless, saw beads and locket scattered wide on
the floor.

" My locket, my locket," she said, in a loud, frightened
whisper, to Adam ; " never mind the beads."

Adam had already seen where the locket fell, for it had
attracted his glance as it leaped out of her frock. It had
fallen on the raised wooden dais Vv'here the band sat, not on
the stoiae floor ; and as Adam picked it up, he saw the glass
with the dark and light locks of hair under it. It had fallen
that side upward, so the glass was not broken. He turned it
over on his hand, and saw the enamelled gold back,

" It isn't hurt," he said, as he held it towards Hetty, who
was unable to take it because both of her hands were occupied
with Totty.

" Oh, it doesn't matter, I don't mind about it," said Hetty,
who had been pale and was now red.

" Not matter ? " said Adam, gravely. " You seemed very
frightened about it. I'll hold it till you're ready to take it,"
he added, quietly closing his hand over it, that she might not
think he wanted to look at it again.

By this time Molly had come with bonnet and shawl, and
as soon as she had taken Totty, Adam placed the locket in
Hetty's hand. She took it with an air of indifference, and
put it in her pocket ; in her heart, vexed and angry with Adam
because he had seen it, but determined now that she would
show no more signs of agitation.

" See," she said, " they're taking their places to dance ;
let us go."

Adam assented silently. A puzzled alarm had taken pos-
session of him. Had Hetty a lover he didn't know f ? — for
none of her relations, he was sure, would give her a locket like
that j and none of her admirers, with whom he was acquainted,
was in the position of an accepted lover, as the giver of that
locket must be. Adam was lost in the utter impossibility of
finding any person for his fears to alight on ; he could only
feel with a terrible pang that there was something in Hetty's
life unknown to him ; that, while he had been rocking him-
self in the hope that she would come to love him. she was

ADAM BEDS.

26t

already loving another. The pleasure of the dance with Hetty
was gone ; his eyes, when they rested on her, had an uneasy
questioning expression in them ; he could think of nothing to
say to her ; and she, too, was out of temper and disinclined to
speak. They were both glad when the dance was ended.

Adam was determined to stay no longer ; no one wanted
him, and no one would notice if he slipped away. As soon as
he got out of doors he began to walk at his habitual rapid
pace, hurrying along without knowing why, busy with the
painful thought that the memory of this day, so full of honor
and promise to him, was poisoned forever. Suddenly, when
he was far on through the Chase, he stopped, startled by a
flash of reviving hope. After all, he might be a fool, making
a great misery out of a trifle. Hetty, fond of finery as she
was, might have bought the thing herself. It looked too ex-
pensive for that— it looked like the things on uhite satin in
thegreat jeweler's shop at Rosseter. But Adam had very im- \

perfect notions of the value of such things, and he thought it «'

would certainly not cost more than a guinea. Perhaps Hetty
had had as much as that in Christmas boxes, and there was
no knowing but she might have been childish enough to spend
It in that way; she was such a young thing, and she couldn't
help loving finery ! But then, why had she been so frightened
about It at first, and changed color so, and afterwards pre-
tended not to care t Oh, that was because she was ashamed
of his seeing that she had such a smart thing — she was con-
scious that it was wrong for her to spend the money on it, and
she knew that Adam disapproved of finery. It was a proof
she cared about what he liked and disliked. She must have
_thought from his silence and gravity afterwards that he was
very much displeased with her, that he was inclined to be
harsh and severe towards her foibles. And as he walked on
more quietly, chewing the cud of his new hope, his only un-
easiness was that he had behaved in a way that might chill
Hetty's feelings toward him. For this last view of the matter
must be the true one. How could Hetty have an accepted
lover, quite unknown to him ? She was never away from her
uncle's house for more than a day ; she could have no acquaint-
ances that did not come there, and no intimacies unknown to
her uncle and aunt. It would be folly to believe that the
locket was given to her by a lover. The little ring of dark
hair he felt sure was her own ; he could form no guess about
the light hair under it, for he had not seen it very distinctly.
It might be a bit of her father's or mother's, who had died

262 ADAA/ BEDE.

when she was a child, and she would naturally put a bit of
her own along with it.

And so Adam went to bed comforted, having woven for
himself an ingenious web of probabilities — the surest screen
a wise man can place between himself and the truth. His
last waking thoughts melted into a dream that he was with
Hetty again at the Hall Farm, and then he was asking her to
forgive him for being so cold and silent.

And while he was dreaming this, Arthur was leading Hetty
to the dance, and saying to her in low hurried tones, " I shall
be in the wood the day after to-morrow at seven ; come as
early as you can." And Hetty's foolish joys and hopes, which
had fiown away for a little space, scared by a mere nothing,
now all came fluttering back, unconscious of the real peril.
She was happy for the first time this long day, and wished that
dance would last for hours. Arthur wished it too ; it was the
last weakness he meant to indulge in ; and a man never lie?
with more delicious languor under the influence of a passion,
than when he has persuaded himself that he shall subdue it
to-morrow.

But Mrs. Poyser's wishes were quite the reverse of this,
for her mind was filled with dreary forebodings as to the
retardation of to-morrow morning's cheese in consequence of
these late hours. Now that Hetty had done her duty and
danced one dance with the young squire, Mr. Poyser must go
out and see if the cart was come back to fetch them, for it
was half past ten o'clock, and notwithstanding a mild sugges-
tion on his part that it would be bad manners for them to be
the first to go, Mrs. Poyser was resolute on the point, " man-
ners or no manners."

" What, going already, Mrs. Poyser ? " said old Mr. Donni-
thorne, as she came to courtesy and take leave ; " I thought
we should not part with any of our guests till eleven ; Mrs.
Irwine and I, who are elderly people, think of sitting out the
dance till then."

" Oh, your honor, it's all right and proper for gentlefolks
to stay up by candle-light — they've got no cheese on their
minds. We're late enough as it is, an' there's no lettin' the
cows know as they mustn't want to be milked so early to-
morrow mornin'. So, if you'll please t' excuse us, we'll take
our leave."

" Eh ! " she said to her husband, as they set off in the
cart, " I'd sooner ha' brewin' day and washin' day together
than one o' these pleasurin' days. There's no work so tirin'

ADAM BEDE. 26^

as danglin' about an' starin' an' not rightly knowin what you're
goin' to do next ; an' keepin' your face i' smilin' order like a
grocer o' market-day, for fear people shouldna think you civil
enough. An' you've nothing to show for't when it's done, if
it isn't a yallow face wi' eatin' things as disagree."

'^ Nay, nay," said Mr. Poyser, who was in his merriest
mood, and felt that he had had a great day, '' a bit o' pleas-
uring's good for thee sometimes. An' thee danc'st as well
as any of 'em, for I'll back thee against all the wives i' the
parish for a light foot an' ankle. An' it was a great honor
for th' young squire to ask thee first— I reckon it was because
I sat at the head o' the table an' made the speech. An'
Hetty loo—she never had such a partner before— a fineyoun^
gentleman in reg'mentals. It'll serve you to talk on, Hett>t
when you're an old woman — how you danced wi' the youn<^
squire, the day he come o' age." '^

CHAPTER XXVir.

A CRISIS,

It was beyond the middle of August— nearly three weeks
after the birthday feast. The reaping of the wheat had
begun "in our north midland county of Loamshire, but the
han'est was likely still to be retarded by the heavy rains,
which were causing inundations and much damage through-
out the country. From this last trouble the Broxton alid
Hayslope farmers, on their pleasant uplands and in their
brook-watered valleys, had not suffered, and as I cannot
pretend that they were such exceptional farmers as to love
the general good better than their own, you will infer that
they were not in very low spirits about the rapid rise in the
price of bread, so long as there was hope of gathering in their
own corn undamaged ; and occasional days of sunshine and
drying winds flattered this hope.

The eighteenth of August was one of these days, when the
sunshine looked brighter in all eyes for the gloom that went
before. Grand masses of cloud were hurried across the blue
sky, and the great round hills behind the Chase seemed aliv«
with their flying shadows ; the sun was hidden for a moment,

264 ADAM BEDE.

and then shone out warm again like a recovered joy ; the
leaves, still green, were tossed off the hedgerow trees by the
wind ; around the farm-houses there was a sound of clapping
doors, the apples fell in the orchards, and the stray horses on
the green sides of the lanes and on the common had their
manes blown about their faces. And yet the wind seemed
only part of the general gladness, because the sun was shining.
A merry day for the children, who ran and shouted to see if
they could top the wind with their voices ; and the grown-up
people, too, were in good spirits, inclined to believe in yet
finer days, when the wind had fallen. If only the corn were
not ripe enough to be blown out of the husk and scattered
as untimely seed !

And yet a day on which a blighting sorrow may fall upon
a man. For if it be true that Nature at certain moments
seems charged with a presentiment of one indi\'idual lot,
must it not also be true that she seems unmindful, uncon-
scious of another ? For there is no hour that has not its births
of gladness and despair, no morning brightness that does not
bring new sickness to desolation as well as new forces to
genius and love. There are so many of us, and our lots are
so different : what wonder that Nature's mood is often in
harsh contrast with the great crisis of our lives? We are
children of a large family, and must learn, as such children
do, not to expect that our hurts will be made much of — to be
content with little nurture and caressing, and help each other
the more.

It was a busy day with Adam, who of late had done
almost double work ; for he was continuing to act as foreman
for Jonathan Burge, until some satisfactory person could be
found to supply his place, and Jonathan was slow to find
that person. But he had done the extra work cheerfully, for
his hopes were buoyant again about Hetty. Every time she
had seen him since the' birthday, she had seemed to make an
effort to behave all the more kindly to him, that she might
make him understand she had forgiven liis silence and cold-
ness during the dance. He had never mentioned the locket
to her again ; too happy that she smiled at him — still happier
because he observed in her a more subdued air, something
that he interpreted as the growth of womanly tenderness and
seriousness. " Ah ! " he thought, again and again, " she's
only seventeen ; she'll be thoughtful enough after a while.
And her aunt allays says how clever she is at the work.
She'll make a wife as mo'.her '11 have no occasion to grumble

ADAM BEDE. 265

at, after all." To be sure, he had only seen her at home
Avice since the birthday ; for one Sunday when he was intend-
ing to go from church to the Hall Farm, Hetty had joined
the party of upper servants from the Chase, and had gone
home with them — almost as if she were inclined to encourage
Mr. Craig. " She's takin' too much likin' to them folks i' the
housekeeper's room," Mrs. Puyser remarked. " For my part,
I was never overfond o' gentlefolk's servants — they're mostly
like the fine ladies' fat dogs, nayther good for barking nor
butcher's meat, but on'y for show." And another evening
she was gone to Treddleston to buy some things, though to
his great surprise, as he was returning home, he saw her at a
distance getting over a stile quite out of the Treddleston road.
But when he hastened to her, she was very kind, and asked
him to go in again when he had taken her to the yard gate.
She had gone a little farther into the fields, after coming from
Treddleston, because she didn't want to go in, she said : it
was so nice to be out of doors, and her aunt always made
such a fuss about it if she wanted to go out. " Oh, do come
in with me ! " she said as he was going to shake hands with
her at the gate, and he could not resist that. So he went in
and Mrs. Poyser was contented with only a slight remark on
Hetty's being later than was expected ; while Hetty, who had
looked out of spirits when he met her, smiled, and talked,
and waited on them all with unusual promptitude.

That was the last time he had seen her ; but he meant to
make leisure for going to the Farm to-morrow. To-day, he
knew, was her day for going to the Chase to sew with the
lady's maid, so he would get as much work done as possible
this evening, that the next might be clear.

One piece of work that Adam was superintending was
some slight repairs at the Chase Farm, which had been
hitherto occupied by Satchell, as bailiff, but which it was now
rumored that the old squire was going to let to a smart man
in top boots, who had been seen to ride over it one day.
Nothing but the desire to get a tenant could account for the
squire's undertaking repairs, though the Saturday-evening
party at Mr. Casson's agreed over their pipes that no man in
his senses would take the Chase Farm unless there was a bit
more plough-land laid to it. However that might be, the re-
pairs were ordered to be executed with all despatch ; and
Adam, acting for Mr. Burge, was carrying out the order with
his usual energ}-. But to-day, having been occupied else-
where, he had not been able to arrive at the Chase Farm till

266 ADAM BEDE.

late in the afternoon ; and he then discovered that some old
roofing, which he had calculated on preserving, had given
way. There was clearly no good to be done with this part
of the building without pulling it all down; and Adam im-
mediately saw in his mind a plan for building it up again, so
as to make the most convenient of cow-sheds and calf-pens,
without any great expense for materials. So, when the work-
men were gone, he sat down, took out his pocket-book, and
busied himself with sketching a plan, and making a specifica-
tion of the expenses, that he might show it to Burge the next
morning, and set him on persuading the squire to consent.
To " make a good job " of anything, however small, was al-
ways a pleasure to Adam ; and he sat on a block, with his
book resting on a planing-table, whistling low every now and
then, and turning his head on one side with a just perceptible
smile of gratification — of pride, too, for if Adam loved a bit
of good work, he loved also to think, " I did it ! " And I be-
lieve the only people who are free from that weakness are
those who have no work to call their own. It was nearly
seven before he had finished and put on his jacket again ;
and, on giving a last look round, he observed that Seth, who
had been working here to-da}', had left his basket of tools be-
hind him. " Why, th' lad's forgot his tools," thought Adam,
" and he's got to work up at the shop to-morrow. There
never was such a chap for wool-gathering ; he'd leave his
head behind him, if it was loose. However, it's lucky I've
seen 'em ; I'll carry 'em home."

The buildings of the Chase Farm lay at one extremity of
the Chase, at about ten minutes' walking distance from the
Abbey. Adam had come thither on his pony, intending to
ride to the stables, and put up his nag on his way home. At
the stables he encountered Mr. Craig, who had come to look
at 'the captain's new horse, on which he was to ride away the
day after to-morrow ; and Mr, Craig detained him to tell how
all the servants were to collect at the gate of the court-yard
to wish the young squire luck as he rode out ; so that, by the
time Adam had gone into the Chase, and was striding along
with the basket of tools over his shoulder, the sun was on the
point of setting, and was sending level crimson rays among
the great trunks of the old oaks, and touching every bare
patch of ground with a transient glory, that made it look like
a jewel dropped upon the grass. The wind had fallen now,
and there was only enough breeze to stir the delicate-stemmed
leaves. Any one who had been sitting in the house all day

ADAM BEDE. 267

would have been glad to walk now ; but Adam had been
quite enough in the open air to wish to shorten his way home ;
and he bethought himself that he might do so by striking
across the Chase and going through the Grove, where he had
never been for years. He hurried on across the Chase, stalk-
ing along the narrow paths between the fern, with Gyp at his
heels, not lingering to watch the magnificent changes of the
light — hardly once thinking of it — yet feeling its presence in
a certain calm happy awe which mingled itself with his busy
working-day thoughts. How could he help feeling it? The
very deer felt it, and were more timid.

Presently, Adam's thoughts recurred to what Mr. Craig
had said about Arthur Donnithorne, and pictured his going
away, and the changes that might take place before he came
back ; then they travelled back aftectionately over the old
scenes of boyish companionship, and dwelt on Arthur's good
qualities, which Adam had a pride in, as we all have in the
virtues of the superior who honors us. A nature like Adam's,
with a great need ot love and reverence in it, depends for so
much of its happniess on what it can believe and feel about
others ! And he had no ideal world of dead heroes ; he knew
little of the life of men in the past ; he must find the beings
to whom he could chng with loving admiration among those
who came within speech of him. These pleasant thoughts
about Arthur brought a milder expression than usual into his
keen rough face; perhaps they were the reason why, when he
opened the old green gate leadmg into the Grove, he paused
to pat Gyp, and say a kind word to him.

After that pause, he strode on again along the broad wind-
ing path through the Grove. What grand beeches ! Adam
delighted in a fine tree of all things ; as the fisherman's sight
is keenest on the sea, so Adam's perceptions weie jnore at
home with trees than with other objects. He kept them in
his memory, as a painter does, with all the flecks and knots
in their bark, all the curves and angles of their bougns ; and
had often calculated the height and contents of a trunk to a
nicety, as he stood looking at it. No wonder that, notwith-
standing his desire to get on, he could not help pausing to
look at a curious large beech which he had seen standing be-
fore him at a turning in the road, and convince himself that it
was not two trees wedded together, but only one. For the
rest ot his life he remembered that moment when be was
calmly examining the beech, as a man remembers his last
glimpse of the home where his youth was jmssed, before thfcr

268 ADAM BEDE.

road turned, and he saw it no more. The beech stood at the
last turning before the Grove ended in an archway of boughs
that let in the eastern light ; and as Adam stepped away
from the tree to continue his walk, his eyes fell on two figures
about twenty yards before him.

He remained as motionless as a statue, and turned almost
as pale. The two figures were standing opposite to each
other, with clasped hands, about to part ; and while they were
bending to kiss. Gyp, who had been running among the brush-
wood, came out, caught sight of them, and gave a sharp bark.
They separated with a start — one hurried through the gate
out of the grove, and the other, turning round, walked slowly,
with a sort of saunter, toward Adam, who still stood transfixed
and pale, clutching tighter the stick with which he held the
basket of tools over his shoulder, and looking at the approach-
ing figure with eyes in which amazement was fast turning to
fierceness.

Arthur Donnithorne looked flushed and excited ; he had
tried to make unpleasant feelings more bearable by drinking
a little more wine than usual at dinner to-day, and was still
enough under its flattering influence to think more lightly of
this unwished-for rencontre with Adam than he would other-
wise have done. After all, Adam was the best person who
could have happened to see him and Hetty together ; he was
a sensible fellow, and would not babble about it to other peo-
ple. Arthur felt confident that he could laugh the thing off
and explain it away. And so he sauntered forward with elab-
orate carelessness — his flushed face, his evening dress of fine
cloth and fine linen, his white jewelled hands half thrust into
his waistcoat pockets, all shone upon by the strange evening
light which the light clouds had caught up even to the zenith,
and were now shedding down between the topmost branches
above him.

Adam was still motionless, looking at him as he came up.
He understood it all now — the locket and everything else that
had been doubtful to him : a terrible scorching light showed
him the hidden letters that changed the meaning of the past.
If he had moved a muscle, he must inevitably have sprung
upon Arthur like a tiger ; and in the conflicting emotions that
filled those long moments he had told himself that he would
not give loose to passion — he would only speak the right thing.
He stood as if petrified by an unseen force, but the force was
his own strong will.

" Well, Adam," said Arthur, " you have been looking at

A£>AM BEDS. 260

the fine old beeches, eh ? They're not to be come near by
the hatchet, though ; this is a sacred grove. I overtook pretty
li'.tle Hetty Sorrel as I was coming to my den — the Hermit-
age there. She ought not to come home this way so late. So
I took care of her to the gate, and asked for a kiss for my
pains. But I must get back now, for this road is confound-
edly damp. Good-night, Adam ; I shall see you to-morrow
— to say good-by, you know."

Arthur was too much preoccupied with the part he was play-
ing himself to be thoroughly aware of the expression in Adam's
face. He did not look directly at Adam, but glanced careless-
ly round at the trees, and then lifted up one foot to look at the
sole of his boot. He cared to say no more ; he had thrown
quite dust enough into honest Adam's eyes ; and, as he spoke
the last words, he walked on.

" Stop a i it sir," said Adam, in a hard, peremptory voice,
without turning round. "I've got a word to say to you."

Arthur paused in surprise. Susceptible persons are more
affected by a change of tone than by unexpected words, and
Arthur had the susceptibility of a nature at once affectionate
and vain. He was still more surprised when he saw that Adam
had not moved, but stood with his back to him, as if summon-
ing him to return. What did he mean .? He was going to
make a serious business of this affair. Confound the fellow !
Arthur felt his temper rising. A patronizing disposition al-
ways has its meaner side, and in the confusion of his irritation
and alarm there entered the feeling that a man to whom he
had shown so much favor as to Adam was not in a position to
criticise his conduct. And yet he was dominated, as one who
feels himself in the wrong always is, by the man whose good
opinion he cares for. In spite of pride and temper, there was
as much deprecation as anger in his voice when he said,

" What do you mean, Adam ? "

"I mean, sir," answered Adam, in the same harsh voice,
still without turning round, " I mean, sir, that you don't de-
ceive me by j^our light words. This is not the first tim.e you've
met Hetty Sorrel in this grove, and this is not the first time
you've kissed her."

Arthur felt a startled uncertainty how far Adam was speak-
ing from knowledge and how far from mere inference. And
this uncertainty, whicli prevented him from contriving a uru-
d-jnt answer, heightened his irritation. He said, in "a hi^h,
sharp tone,

*• Well, sir, what then ? "

e70

ADAM BEDE.

" Why, then, instead of acting like th' upright, honorable
man we've all believed you to be, you've been acting the part
of a selfish, light-minded scoundrel You know, as well as I
do, what it's to lead to, when a gentleman like you kisses and
makes love to a young woman like Hetty, and gives her pres-
ents as she's frightened for other folks to see. And I say ii
again, you're acting the part of a selfish, light-minded scoun-
drel, though it cuts me to th' heart to say so, and I'd rather
ha' lost my right hand."

"Let me tell you, Adam," said Arthur, bridling his grow-
ing anger, and trying to recur to his careless tone, " you're
not only devilishly impertinent, but you're talking nonsense.
Every pretty girl is not such a fool as you, to suppose that
when a gentleman admires her beauty, and pays her a little
attention, he must mean something particular. Ever)'^ man
likes to flirt with a pretty girl, and every pretty girl likes to be
flirted with. The wider the distance between them the less
harm there is, for then she's not likely to deceive herself.

" I don't know what you mean by flirting," said Adam,
*' but if you mean behaving to a woman as if you loved her, and
yet not loving her all the while, I say that's not th' action of
an honest man, and what isn't honest does come t' harm. I'm
not a fool, and you're not a fool, and you know better than
v/hat you're saying. You know it couldn't be made public as
you've behaved to Hetty as y' have done, without her losing
her character, and bringing shame and trouble on her and her
relations. What if you meant nothing by your kissing and
your presents ? Other folks won't believe as you've meant
nothing ; and don't tell me about her not deceiving herself.
I tell you as you've filled her mind so with the thought of you
as it'll mayhap poison her life ; and she'll never love another
man as 'ud make her a good husband."

Arthur had felt a sudden relief while Adam was speaking;
he perceived that Adam had no positive knowledge of the past,
clnd that there was no irrevocable damage done by this even-
ing's unfortunate rencontre. Adam could still be deceived.
The candid Arthur had brought himself into a position in
which successful lying was his only hope. The hope allayed
his anger a little.

" Well, Adam," he said, in a tone of friendly concession,
"you're perhaps right. Perhaps I've gone a little too far in
taking notice of the pretty little thing, and stealing a kiss now
and then. You're such a grave, steady fellow, you don't un-
derstand the temptation to such trifling. I'm sure I wouldn't

ADAM BEDE.

271

bring any trouble or annoyance on her and the good Poysers
on any account if I could help it. But I think you look a little
too seriously at it. YOu know I'm going away immediately,
so I shan't make any more mistakes of the kind. But let us
say good-night " — Arthur here turned round to walk on —
' and talk no more about the matter. The whole thing will soon
be forgotten."

" No, by God ! " Adam burst out, with rage that could be
controlled no longer, throwing down the basket of tools, and
striding forward till he was right in front of Arthur. All his
jealousy and sense of personal injury, which he had been hith-
erto trying to keep under, had leaped up and mastered him.
What man of us, in the first moments of a sharp agony, could
ever feel that the fellow-man who has been the medium of in-
flicting it did not mean to hurt us ? In our instinctive rebel-
lion against pain we are children again, and demand an active
will to wreak our vengeance on. Adam at this moment could
only feel that he had been robbed of Hetty — robbed treacher-
ously by the man in whom he had trusted ; and he stood close
in front of Arthur, with fierce eyes glaring at him, with pale
lips and clenched hands, the hard tones in which he had hith-
erto been constraining himself to express no more than a just
indignation, giving way to a deep agitated voice that seemed
to shake him as he spoke.

" No, it'll not be soon forgot, as you've come in between
her and me, when she might ha' loved me — it'll not soon be
forgot, as you've robbed me o' my happiness, while I thought
you was my best friend, and a noble-minded man, as I was
proud to work for. And you've been kissing her, and meaning
nothing, have you } And I never kissed her i' my life, but I'd
ha' worked hard for years for the right to kiss her. And you
make light of it. You think little o' doing what may damage
other folks, so as you get your bit o' trifling, as means nothing.
I throw back your favors, for you're not the man I took you
for. I'll never count you my friend any more. I'd rather
you'd act as my enemy, and fight me where I stand — it's all th'
amends you can make me."

Poor Adam, possessed by rage that could find no other
vent, began to throw off his coat and his cap, too blind with
passion to notice the change that had taken place in Arthur
while he was speaking. Arthur's lips were now as pale as
Adam's ; his heart was beating violently. The discovery that
Adam loved Hetty was a shock which made him for the mo-
ment see himself in the light of Adam's indignation, and re

iy2 At>AM BEDE.

gard Adam's suffering as not merely a consequence, but an
element of his error. The words of hatred and contempt —
the first he had ever heard in his life-^^seemed like scorchinj;
missiles that were making ineffaceable scars on him. All
screening self-excuse, which rarely falls quite away while others
respect us, forsook him for an instant, and he stood face to
face with the first great irrevocable evil he had ever committed.
He was only twenty-one — and three months ago — nay, much
later — he had thought proudly that no man should ever be
able to reproach him justly. His first impulse, if there had
been time for it, would perhaps have been to utter words of pro-
pitiation ; but Adam had no sooner thrown off his coat and
cap than he became aware that Arthur was standing pale and
motionless, with his hands still thrust in his waistcoat pockets.

" What ! " he said, " won't you fight me like a man ? You
know I won't strike you while you stand so."

" Go away, Adam," said Arthur, " I don't want to fight
you,"

" No," said Adam, bitterly, " you don't want to fight me ;
you think I'm a common man, as you can injure without an-
swering for it."

" I never meant to injure you," said Arthur, with returning
anger. "I didn't know you loved her."

" But you've made her \ovq you,^' said Adam. "You're a
double-faced man — I'll never believe a word you say again."

"Go away, I tell you," said Arthur, angrily, "or we shall
both repent."

" No," said Adam, with a convulsed voice, " I swear I
won't go away without fighting you. Do you want provoking
any more ? I tell you you're a coward and a scoundrel, and
I despise you."

The color had all rushed back to Arthur's face ; in a mo-
ment his white rigl.t hand was clenched, and dealt a blow like
liglitning, which sent Adam staggering backward. His blood
was as thoroughly up as Adam's now, and the two men, for-
getting the emotions that had gone before, fought with the in-
stinctive fierceness of panthers in the deepening twilight dark-
ened by the trees. The delicate-handed gentleman was a
match for the workman in everythmg but strength, and
Arthur's skill in parrying enabled him to protract the struggle
for some long moments. But, between unarmed men, the
battle is to the strong, where the strong is no blunderer, and
Arthur must sink under a well-planted blow of Adam's as
a steel rod is broken by an iron bar. The blow soon came,

DAM BiLDE.

and Arthur fell, his head lying concealed in a tuft of fern, so
that Adam could only discern his darkly-clad body.

He stood still in the dim light, wailing for Arthur to rise.
The blow had been given now, toward which he had been
straining all the force of nerve and muscle — and what was the
good of it? What had he done by fighting ? Only satisfied
his own passion, only wreaked his own vengeance. He had
not rescued Hetty, not changed the past — there it was, just as
it had been ; and he sickened at the vanity of his own rage.

But why did not Arthur rise ? He was perfectly motion-
less, and the time seemed long to Adam Good God!

had the blow been too much for him ? Adam shuddered at
the thought of his own strength, as with the oncoming of this
dread he knelt down by Arthur's side and lifted his head from
among the fern. There was no sign of life ; the eyes and
teeth were set. The horror that rushed over Adam com-
pletely mastered him, and forced upon him his own belief.
He could feel nothing but that death was in Arthur's face,
and that he was helpless before it. He made not a single
movement, but knelt like an image of despair gazing at an
image of death.

CHAPTER XXVni.

A DILEMMA.

It was only a few minutes measured by the clock — though
Adam always thought it had been a long while — before he
perceived a gleam of consciousness in Arthur's face and a
slight shiver through his frame. The intense joy that
flooded his soul brought back some of the old affection with
it.

" Do you feel any pain, sir ? " he said, tenderly, loosening
Arthur's cravat.

Arthur turned his eyes on Adam with a vague stare which
gave way to a slightly startled motion, as if from the shock of
returning memory. But he only shivered again, and said
nothing.

" Do you feel any hurt, sir t " Adam said again, with a
trembling in his voice.

Arthur put his hand up to his waistcoat buttons, and when

,74 A DA A/ BEDE.

Adam had unbuttoned it, he took a longer breath. "Lay
my head down," he said, faintly, " and get me some water, it
you can."

Adam laid the head down gently on the fern again, and,
emptying the tools out of the flag basket, hurried through the
trees to the edge of the grove bordering on the Chase, where
a brook ran below the bank.

When he returned with his basket leaking, but still half
full, Arthur looked at him with a more thoroughly reawakened
consciousness.

"Can you drink a drop" out o' your hand, sir?" said
Adam, keeeling down again to lift up Arthur's head.

" No," said Arthur, " dip my cravat in and souse it on my
head."

The water seemed to do him some good, for he presently
raised himself a little higher, resting on Adam's arm,

" Do you feel any hurt inside, sir? " Adam asked again.
" No— no hurt," said Arthur, still faintly, " but rather
done up."

After a while he said, " I suppose I fainted away when
you knocked me down."

" Yes, sir, thank God," said Adam. " I thought it was
worse."

"What ! you thought you'd done for me, eh ? come, help
me on my legs."

" I feel terribly shaky and dizzy," Arthur said, as he stood
leaning on Adam's arm ; " that blow of yours must have come
against me like a battering-ram. I don't believe I can walk
alone."

" Lean on me, sir ; I'll get you along," said Adam.
" Or, will you sit down a bit longer, on my coat here ? and I'll
prop y' up. You'll perhaps be better in a minute or two."

" No," said Arthur. " I'll go to the Hermitage— I think
I've got some brandy there. There's a short road to it a
little farther on, near the gate. If you'll just help me on."

They walked slowly, with frequent pauses, but without
speaking again. In both of them the concentration in the
present which had attended the first moments of Arthur's re-
vival had now given way to a vivid recollection of the previous
scene. It was nearly dark in the narrow path among the
trees, but within the circle of fir-trees round the Hermitage
there was room for the growing moonlight to enter in at the
windows. Their steps were noiseless on the thick carpet of
fir needles, and the outward stillness seemed to heighten theU

ADAM BEDE. 275

inward consciousness as Arthur took the key out of his pocket
aqd placed it in Adam's hand for him to open the door.
Adam had not known before that Arthur had furnished the
old Hermitage and made it a retreat for himself, and it was a
surprise to him, when he opened the door, to see a snug room
with all the signs of frequent habitation.

Arthur loosed Adam's arm and threw himself on the otto-
man. "You'll see my hunting-bottle somewhere," he said.
"A leather case with a bottle and glass in."

Adam was not long in finding the case. " There's very
little brandy in it, sir," he said, turning it downward over the
glass, as he held it before the window, " hardly this little glass-
ful."

" Well, give me that," said Arthur, v/ith the peevishness
of physical depression. When he had taken some sips, Adam
said, " Hadn't I better run to th' house, sir, and get some more
brandy ? I can be there and back pretty soon. It'll be a
stiff walk home for you, if you don't have something to re-
vive you."

" Yes — go. But don't say I'm ill. Ask for my man Pym,
and tell him to get it from Mills, and not to say I'm at the
Hermitage. Get some water too."

Adam was relieved to have an active task — both of them
were relieved to be apart from each other for a short time.
But Adam's swift pace could not still the eager pain of think-
ing— of living again with concentrated suffering through the
last wretched hour, and looking out from it over all the new,
sad futuie.

Arthur lay still for some minutes after Adam was gone,
but presently he rose feebly from the ottoman and peered
about slowly in the broken moonlight, seeking something. It
was a short bit of wax candle that stood among a confusion
of writing and drawing materials. There was more searching
for the means of lighting the candle, and when that was done
he went cautiously round the room, as if wishing to assure
himself of the presence or absence of something. At last he
had found a slight thing, which he put first in his pocket, and
then, on a second thought, took out again and thrust deep
down into a waste-paper basket. It was a woman's little pink
silk neckerchief. He set the candle on the table and thre\<
himself down on the ottoman again, exhausted with the
effort.

When Adam came back with his supplies, his entrance
awoke Arthur from a doze.

276

ADAAf BEDE.

" That's right," Arthur said ; " I'm tremendously in want
of some brandy vigor."

" I'm glad to see you've got a light, sir," remarked
Adam. " I've been thinking I'd better have asked for a lan-
tern."

"No, no; the candle will last long enough — I shall soon
be up to walking home now."

" I can't go before I've seen you safe home, sir," said
Adam, hesitatingly.

"No \ it will be better for you to stay — sit down."

Adam sat down, and they remained opposite to each other
in uneasy silence, while Arthur slowly drank brandy-and-water,
with visibly renovating effect. He began to lie in a more vol-
untary position, and looked as if he were less overpowered by
bodily sensations. Adam was keenly alive to these indica-
tions, and as his anxiety about Arthur's condition begun to be
allayed, he felt more of that impatience which every one knows
who has had his just indignations suspended by the physical
state of the culprit. Yet there was one thing on his mind to
be done before he could recur to remonstrance ; it was to
confess what had been unjust in his own words. Perhaps he
longed all the more to make this confession, that his indigna-
tion might be free again ; and as he saw the signs of returning
ease in Arthur, the words again and again came to his lips
and went back, checked by the thought that it would be bet-
ter to leave everything till to-morrow. As long as they were
silent they did not look at each other, and a foreboding came
across Adam that if they began to speak as though they
remembered the past — if they looked at each other with full
recognition — they must take fire again. So they satin silence
till the bit of wax candle flickered low in the socket ; the silence
all the while becoming more irksome to Adam. Arthur had
just poured out some more brandy-and-water, and he threw
one arm behind his head and drew up one leg in an attitude
of recovered ease, which was an irresistible temptation to
Adam to speak what was on his mind.

" You begin to feel more yourself again, sir," he said, as
the candle went out ; and they were half hidden from each
other in the faint moonlight.

" Yes ; I don't feel good for much — very lazy, and not in-
clined to move ; but I'll go home when I've taken this dose."

There was a slight pause before Adam said,

" My temper got the better of me, and I said things as
wasn't true. I'd no right to speak as if you'd known you was

ADAM BEDE. ^'I'j

doing me an injury ; you'd no grounds for knowing it ; I've
always kept what I felt for her as secret as I could,"
He paused again before he went on.

" And perhaps I judged you too harsh — I'm apt to be
harsh ; and you may have acted out o' thoughtlessness more
than I should ha' believed was possible for a man with a heart
and a conscience. We're not all put together alike, and we
may misjudge one another. God knows, it's all the joy I
could have now, to think the best of you."

Arthur wanted to go home without saying any more — he
was too painfully embarrassed in mind, as well as too weak in
body, to wish for any farther explanation to-night. And yet
it was a relief to him that Adam reopened the subject in a
way the least difficult for him to answer. Arthur was in the
wretched position of an open, generous man, who has com-
mitted an error which makes deception seem a necessity. The
native impulse to give truth in return for truth, to meet trust
with frank confession, must be suppressed, and duty was
become a question of tactics. His deed was reacting upon
him — was already governing him tyrannously, and forcing him
into a course that jarred with his habitual feelings. The only
aim that seemed admissible to him now was to deceive Adam
to the utmost ; to make Adam think better of him than he
deserved. And when he heard the words of honest retracta-
tion— when he heard the sad appeal with which Adam
ended — he was obliged to rejoice in the remains of ignorant
confidence it implied. He did not answer immediately, for
he had to be judicious, and not truthful

" Say no more about our anger, Adam," he said, at last,
very languidly, for the labor of speech was unwelcome to him \
" I forgive your momentary injustice — it was quite natural,
with the exaggerated notions you had in your mind. We shall
be none the worse friends in future, I hope, because we've
fought ; you had the best of it, and that was as it should be,
for I believe I've been most in the wrong of the two. Come,
let us shake hands."

Arthur held out his hand, but Adam sat still.

" I don't like to say ' No' to that, sir," he said, "but I
can't shake hands till it's clear what we mean by't. I was
wrong when I spoke as if you'd done me an injury knowingl)-,
but I wasn't wrong in what I said before about your be-
havior t' Hetty, and I can't shake hands with you as^if I held
you my friend the same as ever till you've cleared that ud
better." ^

278

ADAM BEDE.

Arthur swallowed his pride and resentment as he drew
back his hand. He was silent for some moments, and then
said, as indifferently as he could,

"I don't know what you mean by clearing up, Adam.
I've told you already that you think too seriously of a little
flirtation. But if you are right in supposing there is any
danger in it — I'm going away on Saturday, and there will be
an end of it. As for the pain it has given you, I'm heartily
sorry for it. I can say no more."

Adam said nothing, but rose from his chair, and stood
with his face towards one of the windows, as if looking at the
blackness of the moonlit fir trees ; but he was in reality con-
scious of nothing but tlie conflict within him. It was of no
use now — his resolution not to speak till to-morrow ; he must
speak there and then. But it was several minutes before he
tnrned round and stepped near to Arthur, standing and look-
ing dov/n on him as he lay.

"It'll be better for me to speak plain," he said, with evi-
dent effort, " though it's hard work. You see, sir, this isn't
a trifle to me, whatever it may be to you. I'm none o' them
men as can go making love first to one woman, and then t'
another, and don't think it much odds which of 'ein I take.
What I feel for Hetty's a different sort o' love, such as I be-
lieve nobody can know much about but them as feel it, and God
as has given it to them. She's more nor everything else to
me, all but my conscience and my good name. As if it's true
what you've been saying all along — and if it's only been trifling
and flirting, as you call it, as '11 be put an end to by your going
away — why, then, I'd wait, and hope iier heart 'ud turn to me
after all. I'm loath to think you'd speak false to me, and I'll
believe your word however things may look."

" You would be wronging Hetty more .than me r,ot to be-
lieve it," said Arthur, almost violently, starting up from the
ottoman, and moving away. But he threw himself into a
chair again directly, saying more feebly, '' You seem to forget
that, in suspecting me, you are casting imputations upon
her."'

"Nay, sir," Adam said in a calmer voice, as if he wervj
half relieved — for he was too straightforward to make a dis'
tinction between a falsehood and an indirect one — '' Nay,
sir, things don't lie level between Hetty and you. You're
acting with your eyes open, whatever you may do ; but how
do you know what's been in her mind ? .She's all but a child
—as any man with a conscience in him ought to feel bound

ADAM BEDE.

279

to take care on. And whatever you may think, I know you've
disturbed her mind. I know she's been fixing her heart on
you ; for there's a many things clear to me now as I didn't
understand before. But you seem to make light o' what sht
may feel — you don't think o' that.'"

" Good God, Adam, let me alone ! " Arthur burst out im-
petuously ; " I feel it enough without you worrying me."

He was aware of his indiscretion as soon as the words had
escaped him.

"Well, then, if you feel it," Adam rejoined, eagerly ; " if
you feel as you may ha' put false notions into her mind, and
made her believe as you loved her, when all the while you
meaa:. nothing, I've this demand to make of you — I'm not
speaking for myself, but for her. I ask you t' undeceive her
before you go away. Y'arn't going away forever ; and, if
you leave her behind with a notion in her head o' your feeling
about her the same as she feels about you, she'll be hanker-
ing after you, and the mischief may get worse. It may be a
smart to her now, but it'll save her pain i' th' end. I ask
you to write a letter — you may trust to my seeing as she gets
it : tell her the truth, and take blame to yourself for behaving
as you'd no right to do to a young woman as isn't your equal.
I speak plain, sir. But I can't speak any other way. There's
nobody can take care o' Hetty in this thing but me."

" I can do what I think needful in the matter," said
Arthur, more and more irritated by mingled distress and per-
plexity, "without giving promises to you. I shall take what
measures I think proper."

" No," said Adam, in an abrupt decided tone, " that
won't do. I must know what ground I'm treading on. I
must be safe as you've put an end to what ought never to ha'
been begun. I don't forget what's owing to you as a gentle-
ma-1 ; but in this thing we're man and man, and I can't give
up.'

There was no answer for some moments. Then Arthur
said, " I'll see you to-morrow. lean bear no more now ; I'm
ill." He rose as he spoke, and reached his cap, as if intend-
ing to go.

" You won't see her again ! " Adam exclaimed, with a flash
of recurring anger and suspicion, moving towards the door and
placing his back against it. " Either tell me she can nevei
be my wife — tell me you've been lying — or else promise mc
what I've said."

Adam, uttering this alternative, stood like a terrible fata

28o ADAM BEDE.

before Arthur, who had moved forward a step or two, and
now stopped, faint, shaken, sick in mind and bod}'. It seemed
long to both of them — that inward struggle of Arthur's before
he said, feebly, " I promise ; let me go."

Adam moved away from the door and opened it, but when
Arthur reached the step he stopped again and leaned against
the door-post.

" You're not well enough to walk alone, sir," said Adam.
" Take my arm again."

Arthur made no answer, and presently walked on, Adam
following. But after a few steps he stood still again, and said
coldly, " I believe I must trouble you. It's getting late now,
and there may be an alarm set up about me at home."

Adam gave his arm, and they walked on without uttering
a word, till they came where the basket and the tools lay.

" I must pick up the tools, sir," Adam said. " They're
my brother's. I doubt they'll be rusted. If you'll please to
wait a minute."

Arthur stood still without speaking, and no other word
passed between them till they were at the side entrance, where
he hoped to get in without being seen by any one. He said
then, " Thank you ; I needn't trouble you any farther."

" What time will it be conven'ent forme to see you to-mor-
row, sir?" said Adam.

" You may send me word that you're here at five o'clock,"
said Arthur; " not before."

" Good-night, sir," said Adam. But he heard no reply. At
thur had turned into the house.

CHAPTER XXIX.

THE NEXT MORNING.

Arthur did not pass a sleepless night ; he slept long and)
well ; for sleep comes to the perplexed — if the perplexed ara
only weary enough. But at seven he rang his bell and aston-
ished Pym by declaring he was going to get up, and must
have breakfast brought to him at eight.

" And see that my mare is saddled at half-past eight, and
tell my grandfather when he's down that I'm better this morn
ing, and am gone fo'^. . riae/'

ADAM BEDE. jgl

He had been awake an hour, and could rest in bed no
longer. In bed our yesterdays are too oppressive ; if a man
can only get up, though it be but to whistle or to smoke, he
has a present which offers some resistance to the past — sensa-
tions which assert themselves against tyrannous memories.
And if there were such a thing as taking averages of feelino-,
it would certainly be found that in the hunting and shooting
seasons regrets, self-reproach, and mortified pride, weigh
lighter on country gentlemen than in late spring and summer.
Arthur felt that he should be more of a man on horseback.
Even the presence of Pym, waiting on him with the usual
deference, was a reassurance to him after the scenes of yes-
terday ; for, with Arthur's sensitiveness to opinion, the loss of
Adam's respect was a shock to his self-contentment which
suffused his imagination with the sense tliat he had sunk in
all eyes ; as a sudden shock of fear from some real peril
makes a nervous woman afraid even to step, because all her
preceptions are suffused with a sense of danger.

Arthur's, as you know, was a loving nature. Deeds of kind-
ness were as easy to him as a bad habit ; they were the com-
mon issue of his weaknesses and good qualities, of his egotism
and his sympathy. He didn't like to witness pain, and he
liked to have grateful eyes beaming on him as the giver of
pleasure. When he was a lad of seven, he one day kicked
down an old gardener's pitcher of broth, from no motive but
a kicking impulse, not reflecting that it was the old man's
dinner ; but on learning that sad fact, he took his favorite
pencil-case and a silver-hafted knife out of his pocket and
i)ffered them as compensation. He had been the same Arthur
ever since, trying to make all offences forgotten in benefits.
If there were any bitterness in his nature, it could only show
itself against the man who refused to be conciliated by him.
And perhaps the time was come for some of that bitterness
to rise. At the first moment, Arthur had felt pure distress
and self-reproach at discovering that Adam's happiness was
involved in his relation to Hetty ; if there had been a possi-
bility of making Adam tenfold amends — if deeds of gift, or any
other deeds, could have restored Adam's contentment and
regard for him as a benefactor, Arthur would not only have
executed them without hesitation, but would have felt bound
all the more closely to Adam, and weuld never have been
weary of making retribution. But Adam could receive no
amends; his suffering could not be cancelled ; his respect and
alfection could not be recovered by any prompt deeds of

282 ADAM BEDE.

atonement. He stood like an immovable obstacle against
which no pressure could avail ; an embodiment of what Ar-
thur most shrank from believing in — the irrevocableness of
his own wrong doing. The words of scorn, the refusal to
shake hands, the mastery asserted over him in their last con-
versation in the Hermitage — above all, the sense of having
been knocked down, to which a man does not very well recon-
cile himself, even under the most heroic circumstances —
pressed on him with a galling pain which was stronger than
compunction. Arthur would so gladly have persuaded him-
self that he had done no harm ! And if no one had told him
the contrary, he could have persuaded himself so much better.
Nemesis can seldom forge a sword for herself out of our con-
sciences— out of the suffering we feel in the suffering we may
have caused ; there is rarely metal enough there to make an
effective weapon. Our moral sense learns the manners of
good society, and smiles when others smile ; but when some
rude person gives rough names to our actions, she is apt to
take part against us. And so it was with Arthur ; Adam's
judgment of him, Adam's grating words, disturbed his self-
soothing arguments.

Not that Arthur had been at ease before Adam's discov-
ery. Struggles and resolves had transformed themselves into
compunction and anxiety. He was distressed for Hetty's
sake, and distressed for his own, that he must leave her be-
hind. He had always, both in making and breaking resolu-
tions, looked beyond his passion, and seen that it must
speedily end in separation ; but his nature was too ardent
and tender for him not to suffer at this parting ; and on Het-
ty's account he was filled with uneasiness. He had found
out the dream in which she was living — she was to be a lady
in silks and satins; and when he had first talked to her about
his going away, she had asked him tremblingly to let her go
with him and be married. It was his painful knowledge of
this which had given the most exasperating sting to Adam's
reproaches. He had said no word with the purpose of deceiv-
ing her, her vision was all spun by her own childish fancy \
but he was obliged to confess to himself that it was spun half
out of his own actions. And to increase the mischief, on
this last evening he had not dared to hint the truth to Hetty \
he had been obliged to soothe her with tender, hopeful words,
lest he should throw her into violent distress. He felt the
situation acutely ; felt the sorrow of the dear thing in the
present, and thought with a darker anxiety of the tenacity

ADAM BEDE. 28^

which her feeh'ngs might have in the future. That was the
one sharp point which pressed against himj every other he
could evade by hopeful self-persuasion. The whole thin- had
been secret; the Poysers had not the shadow of a suspfcion
INO one except Adam knew anything of what had passed—
no one else was likely to know; for Arthur had impressed
on Hetty that it would be fatal to betray, by word or look
that there had been the least intimacy between them : and
Adam who knew half their secret, would rather help them to
keep It than betray it. It was an unfortunate business alto-
gether, but there was no use in making it worse than it was
by imaginary exaggerations and forebodings of evil that might
never come. The temporary- sadness for Hetty was the worst
consequence : he resolutely turned his eves away from any
bad consequence that was not demonstrably inevitable But
—but Hetty might have had the trouble in some other way
It not m this. And, perhaps, hereafter he might be able to
do a great deal for her, and make up to her for all the tears
she would shed about him. She would owe the advantage of
his care for her in future years to the sorrow she had incurred
now. So good comes out of evil. Such is the beautiful ar-
rangement of things !

Are you inclined to ask whether this can be the same
Arthur who, two months ago, had that freshness of feeling
that delicate honor which shrinks from wounding even a sen-
timent and does not contemplate any more positive offense as
possible for it .'—who thought that his own self-respect was a
higher tribunal than any external opinion ? The same, I as-
sure you ; only under different conditions. Our deeds deter-
mine us, as much as we determine our deeds ; and until we
know what has been or will be the peculiar combination of
outward with inward facts, which constitute a man's critical
actions, it will be better not to think ourselves wise about his
character. There is a terrible coercion in our deeds which
may at first turn the honest man into a deceiver, and then
reconcile him to the change ; for this reason— that the second
wrong presents itself to him in the guise of the only prac-
ticable right. The action which before commission has been
seen with that blended common sense and fresh untarnished
feeling which is the healthy eye of the soul is looked at.after-
ward with the lens of apologetic ingenuity, through which all
things that men call beautiful and ugly are seen to be made
up of textures very much alike. Europe adjusts itself to a
jait accompli, ana so does an individual character— until the
piaad adjustment is disturbed by a convulsive retribution

284 ADAM BEDE.

No man can escape this vitiating effect of an offence againxsi
his own sentiment of right, and the effect was the stronger in
Arthur because of that very need of self-respect which, while
his conscience was still at ease, was one of his best safeguards.
Self-accusation was too painful to him — he could not face it.
He must persuade himself that he had not been very much to
blame ; he began even to pity himself for the necessity he was
under of deceiving Adam ; it was a course so opposed to the
honesty of his own nature. But then it was the only right
thing to do.

Well, whatever had been amiss in him, he was miserable
enough in consequence ; miserable about Hetty ; miserable
about this letter that he had promised to write, and that
seemed at one moment to be a gross barbarity, at another
perhaps the greatest kindness he could do to her. And
across all this reflection would dart every now and then a sud-
den impulse of passionate defiance toward all consequences ;
he would carry Hetty away, and all other considerations might
go to. . . .

In this state of mind the four walls of his room made an
intolerable prison to him ; they seemed to hem in and press
down upon him all the crowd of contradictory thoughts and
conflicting fcv^lings, some of which would fly away in the open
air. He had nly n hour or two to make up his mind in,
and he must get clear and calm. Once on Meg's back, in the
fresh air of that fine morning, he should be more master of
the situation.

The pretty creature arched her bay neck in the sunshine,
and pawed the gravel, and trembled with pleasure when her
master stroked her nose, and patted her, and talked to her
even in a more caressing manner than usual. He loved her
the better because she knew nothing of his secrets. But Meg
was quite as well acquainted with her master's mental state
as many others of her sex with the mental condition of the
nice young gentleman toward whom their hearts are in a
state of fluttering expectation.

Arthur cantered for five miles beyond the Chase, till he
was at the foot of a hill where there were no hedges or trees
to hem in the road. Then he threw the bridle on Meg's neck,
and prepared to make up his mind.

Hetty knew that their meeting yesterday must be the last
before Arthur went away ; there was no possibility of their
contriving another without exciting suspicion ; and she was
like a frightened child, unable to think of anything, only

ADAM BEDE.

28s

able to cry at the mention of parting, and then put her face
up to have the tears kissed away. He could do nothing but
comfort her, and lull her into dreaming on. A letter would
be a dreadfully abrupt way of awakening her ! Yet there
was truth in what Adam said — that it would save her from a
lengthened delusion, which might be worse than a sharp im-
mediate pain. And it was the only way of satisfying Adam,
who must be satisfied for more reasons than one. If he could
have seen her again ! But that was impossible ; there was
such a thorny hedge of hindrances between them, and and
imprudence would be fatal. And yet if he could see her
again, what good would it do } Only cause him to suffer
more from the sight of her distress and the remembrance of
it. Away from him, she was surrounded by all the motives
to self-control.

_A sudden dread here fell like a shadow across his imagi-
nation— the dread lest she should do something violent In
her grief ; and close upon that dread came another, which
deepened the shadow. But he shook them off with the force
of youth and hope. What was the ground for painting the
future in that dark way .> It was just as likelv to be the re-
verse. Arthur told himself, he did not deserve that thin<rs
should turn out so badly— he had never meant beforehand to
do anything his conscience disapproved— he had been led
on by circumstances. There was a sort of implicit confidence
in him that he was really such a good fellow at bottom, Pro-
vidence would not treat him harshly.

At all events, he couldn't help what would come now • all
he could do was to take what seemed to be the best course
at the present moment. And he persuaded himself that that
course was to make the way open between Adam and Hetty
Her heart might really turn to Adam, as he said, after a
while ; and in that case there would have been no great harm
done, smce it was still Adam's ardent wish to make her his
wite. To be sure, Adam was deceived— deceived in a way
that Arthur would have resented as a deep wrong if it had
been practiced on himself. That was a reflection that marred
the consoling prospect. Arthur's cheeks even burned in
mingled shame and irritation at the thought. But what could
a man do in such a dilemma .? He was bound in honor to
say no word that could injure Hetty; his first duty was to
guard her. He would never have told or acted a lie on his
own account. Good God ! what a miserable fool he was to
have brought himself into such a dilemma ; and yet if ever

286 ADAM BEDE.

a man had excuses, he had. (Pity that consequences are de^
tarmined not b)^ excuses but by actions !)

Well, the letter must be written \ it was the only means
that promised a solution of the difficulty. The tears came
into Arthur's eyes as he thought of Hetty reading it ; but it
would be almost as h^d for him to write it ; he was not doing
anything easy to himself, and this last thought helped him
to arrive at a conclusion. He could never deliberately have
taken a step which inflicted pain on another and left hims<ilf
at ease. Even a movement of jealousy at the thought of giv-
ing up Hetty to Adam, went to convince him that he was
making a sacrifice.

When once he had come to this conclusion, he turned Meg
round, and set off home again in a canter. The letter should
be written the first thing, and the rest of the day would be
filled up with other business ; he should have no time to look
behind him. Happily, Irwine and Gawaine were coming to
dinner, and by twelve o'clock the next day he should have left
the Chase miles behind him. There was some security in this
constant occupation against an uncontrollable impulse seizing
him to rush to Hetty, and thrust in her hand some mad pro-
position that would undo everything. Faster and faster went
the sensitive Meg, at every slight sign from her rider, till the
canter had passed into a swift gallop.

" I thought they said th' young mester war took ill last
night," said sour old John, the groom, at dinner-time in the
servants' hall. " He's been ridin' fit to split the mare i' two
this forenoon."

"That's happen one o' the symptoms, John," said the
facetious coachman.

" Then I wish he war let blood for 't, that's all," said
John, grimly.

Adam had been early at the Chase to know how Arthur
was, and had been relieved from all anxiety about the effects
of his blow by learning that he was gone out for a ride. At
five o'clock he was punctually there again, and set up word
of his arrival. In a few minutes Pym came down with a letter
in his hand, and gave it to Adam, saying that the captain was
too busy to see him, and had written everything he had to
say. The letter was directed to Adam, but he went out of
doors again before opening it. It contained a sealed inclosure
directed to Hetty. On the inside of the cover Adam read :

" In the inclosed letter I have written everything you wish.

ADAM BEDE. 25j

I leave it to you to decide whether you will be doing best to
deliver it to Hetty or to return it to me. Ask yourself once
more whether you are not taking a measure which may pain
her more than mere silence.

" There is no need for our seeing each other again now.
We shall meet with better feelings some months hence.

"A. D."

" Perhaps he's i' th' right on't not to see me," thought
Adam. " It's no use meeting to say more hard words, and it's
no use meeting to shake hands and say we're friends again.
We're not friends, an' it's better not to pretend it. I know
forgiveness is a man's duty, but to my thinking, that can only
mean as you're to give up all thoughts o' taking revenge ; it
can never mean as you're t' have your old feelings back again,
for that's not possible. He's not the same man to me, and I
can't feel the same toward him. God help me ! I don't
know whether I feel the same toward anybody ; I seem as if
I'd been measuring my work from a false line, and had got it
all to measure o'er again."

But the question about delivering the letter to Hetty soon
absorbed Adam's thoughts. Arthur had procured some relief
to himself by throwing the decision on Adam with a warning ;
and Adam, who was not given to hesitation, hesitated here.
He determined to feel his way — to ascertain as well as he
could what was Hetty's state of mind before he decided on
delivering the letter.

CHAPTER XXX.

THE DELIVERY OF THE LETTER.

The next Sunday Adam joined the Poysers on their way
out of church, hoping for an invitation to go home with them.
He had the letter in his pocket, and was anxious to have an
opportunity of talking to Hetty alone. He could not see her
face at church, for she had changed her seat, and when he
came up to her to shake hands, her manner was doubtful and
constrained. He expected this, for it was the first time she
had met him since she had been aware that he had seen her
with Arthur in the Grove.

288 ADAM BEDE.

*' Come, you'll go on wi' us, Adam," Mr. Poyser said, when
they reached the turning ; and as soon as they were in the
fields, Adam ventured to offer his arm to Hetty. The children
soon gave them an opportunity of lingering behind a little,
and then Adam said,

"Will you contrive for me to walk out in the garden a bit
with you this evening, if it keeps fine, Hetty } I've something
partic'lar to talk to you about."

Hetty said, "Very well." She was really as anxious as
Adam was that she should have some private talk with him :
she wondered what he thought of her and Arthur : he must
have seen them kissing, she knew, but she had no conception
of the scene that had taken place between Arthur and Adam.
Her first feeling had been that Adam would be very angry
with her, and perhaps would tell her aunt and uncle ; but it
never entered her mind that he would dare to say anything to
Captain Donnithorne. It was a relief to her that he behaved
so kindly to her to-day, and wanted to speak to her alone ; for
she had trembled when she found he was going home with
them lest he should mean " to tell." But, now he wanted to
talk to her by herself, she should learn what he thought, and
what he meant to do. She felt a certain confidence that she
could persuade him not to do anything she did not want him to
do ; she could perhaps even make him believe that she didn't
care for Arthur ; and as long as Adam thought there was any
hope of her having him, he would do just what she liked, she
knew. Besides, she must go on seeming to encourage Adam,
lest her uncle and aunt should be angry, and suspect her of
having some secret lover.

Hetty's little brain was busy with this combination as she
hung on Adam's arm, and said " yes " or " no " to some slight
observations of his about the many hawthorn-berries there
would be for the birds this next winter, and the low-hanging
clouds that would hardly hold up till morning. And when
they rejoined her aunt and uncle, she could pursue her
thoughts without interruption, for Mr. Poyser held that, though
a young man might like to have the woman he was courting
on his arm, he would nevertheless be glad of a little reasona-
ble talk about business the while ; and, for his own part, he
was curious to hear the most recent news about the Chase
Farm. So, through the rest of the walk, he claimed Adam's
conversation for himself ; and Hetty laid her small plots, and
imagined her little scenes of cunning blandishment, as she
walked along by the hedgerows on honest Adam's arm, quite

ADAAf BEDE 289

as well as if she had been an elegantly-clad coquette alone in
her boudoir. For if a country beauty in clumsy shoes be only
shallow-hearted enough, it is astonishing how closely her men
tal processes may resemble those of a lady in society and
crinoline, who applies her refined intellect to the problem of
committing indiscretions without compromising herself. Per-
haps the resemblance was not much the less because Hetty
felt very unhappy all the while. The parting with Arthur was
a double pain to her; mingling with the tumult of passion and
vanity, there was a dim undefined fear that the future might
shape itself in some way quite unlike her dream. She clung
to the comforting hopeful words Arthur had uttered in their
last meeting — " 1 shall come again at Christmas, and then
we will see what can be done." She clung to the belief that
he was so fond of her, he would never be happy without her ;
and she still hugged her secret — that a great gentleman loved
her — with gratified pride, as a superiority over all the girls she
knew. But the uncertainty of the future, the possibilities to
which she could give no shape, began to press upon her like
the invisible weight of air; she was alone on her little island
of dreams, and all round her was the dark unknown water
where Arthur was gone. She could gather no elation of spirits
now by looking forward, but only by looking backward to
build confidence on past words and caresses. But occasionally,
since Thursday evening, her dim anxieties had been almost
lost behind the more definite fear that Adam might betray
what he knew to her uncle and aunt, and his sudden proposi-
tion to talk with her alone had set her thoughts to work in a
new way. She was eager not to lose this e\ening's oppor-
tunity ; and after tea, when the boys were going into the gar-
den, and Totty begged to go with them, Hetty said, with an
alacrity that surprised Mrs. Poyser,
" I'll go with her, aunt."

It did not seem at all surprising that Adam said he would
go too ; and soon he and Hetty were left alone together on the
walk by the filbert-trees, while the boys were busy elsewhere
gathering the large unripe nuts to play at " cob-nut " with, and
Totty was watching them with a puppy-like air of contempla-
tion. It was but a short time — hardly two months — since
Adam had had his mind filled with delicious hopes, as he
stood by Hetty's side in this garden. The remembrance of
(hat scene had often been with him since Thursday evening;
the sunlight through the apple-tree boughs, the red bunches,
Hetty's sweet blush. It came importunately now, on this sad

290

ADAM BEDS.

evening, with the low-hanging clouds ; but he tried to suppress
it, lest some emotion should impel him to say more than was
needful for Hetty's sake.

" After what I saw on Thursday night, Hetty," he began,
"you won't think me making too free i' what I'm going to
say. If you was being courted by any man as 'ud make y' his
wife, and I'd known you was fond of him, and meant to have
him, I should have no right to speak a word to you about it ;
but when I see you're being made love to by a gentleman as
can never marry you, and doesna think o' marrying you, I feel
bound t' interfere for you. I cannot speak about it to them
as are i' the place o' your parents, for that might bring worse
trouble than's needful."

Adam's words relieved one of Hetty's fears, but they also
carried a meaning which sickened her with a strengthened
foreboding. She was pale and trembling, and yet she would
have angrily contradicted Adam if she had dared to betray
her feelings. But she was silent.

" You're so young, you know, Hetty," he went on, almost
tenderly, "and y' haven't seen much o' what goes on in the
world. It's right for me to do what I can to save you from
getting into trouble for want o' your knowing where you're
being led to. If anybody besides me knew what I know
about your meeting a gentleman, and having fine presents
from him, they'd speak light on you, and you'd lose your
character; and, besides that, you'll have to suffer in your feel-
ings wi' giving your love to a man as can never marry you, so
as he might take care of you all your life."

Adam paused, and looked at Hetty, who was plucking the
leaves from the filbert-trees, and tearing them up in her hand.
Her little plans and preconcerted speeches had all forsaken
her, like an ill-learned lesson, under tlie terrible agitation
produced by Adam's words. There vvas a cruel force in their
calm certainty which threatened to grapple and crush ^er
fli.Tisy hopes and fancies. She wanted to resist them — she
wanted to throw them off with angry contradiction ; bui "he
determination to conceal what she felt still governed her. It
wa^ nothing more than a blind prcir.pting nov, .:or she vas
unable to calculate the effect of her words,

"You've no right to say as I lOve him/' she sa'd, !aintiy
but impetuously, oliicking another rough .ea: ana tearing i*
up. She was vei^- beai.tiful in her palenejo and agitation,
with h«j: dark chilcish e;,us dilated, ana '.- r oreach shorter
than usual, Adam's heart yearned ove- ci -^.s ho looked at

ADAM BEDE.

her. Ah ! if he could but comfort her, and soothe her and
save her from this pain ; if he had but some sort of strength
that would enable him to rescue her poor troubled mind^as
he would have rescued her body in the face of all danger''

"I doubt It must be so, Hetty," he said, tenderly • "for I
canna believe you'd let any man kiss you by yourselves and
give you a gold box with his hair, and go a-walking i' the ^rove
to meet him, if you didna love him. I'm not blamino-^'you
for I know It 'ud begin by little and little, till at last^you'd
not be able to throw it off. It's him I blame for stealincx your
love i' that way, when he knew he could never make you the
right amends. He's been trifling with you, and making a
plaything of you, and caring nothing about you as a man ought
to care. =»

" Yes he does care for me ; I know better nor you," Hetty
burst out. Everything was forgotten but the pain and anger
she felt at Adam's words. ^

"Nay, Hetty," said Adam, "if he'd cared for you ri-htiv
he d never ha' behaved so. He told me himself he mWt
nothing by his kissing and presents, and he wanted to make
me believe as you thought light of 'e n too. But I know bet-
ter nor that. I can't help thinking as you've been trustincr
t s loving you well enough to marry you, for all he's a gentle*^
man And that's why I must speak to you about it, Hetty—
for fear you should be deceiving yourself. It's never entered
his head, the thought o' marrying you.

"How do you know .> How durst you say so ? " said Hettv
Ad",m'f '." ''',"'\^ T^ ^^^rn^Xxr^g. The terrible decision of

mind left for the reflection that Arthur would have his reasons
or no telling the_ truth to Adam. Her words and look were
enough to determine Adam ; he must give her the letter
fn. 1?" Pf.'^^P^, ^^"'^ believe me, Hetty ; because you think
he do' °^ '^''V^^^-"^^y°" ''''^^ he loves you belter than
self fn; ;..^ ^""^ ^ ^.^"'' ■' '^-^ P°^^'^^^ ^^ '^e ^^-'-ote him-

he's toIH .f'"^' ^T- -^ ^' "°^ ''^^^' '^'^ '^"er, but he says

consider Hen "f^ '- " , ^>'^' ^^^"^^ ^ ^^^^ 3'°" ^he lette^r,
kwont' ^f"7; ^"^ ^°^\'^^ 'f fal<e too much hold on you

a mad th n. " ^°°'' ^"- >'"" '^ '^^'^' ^^^"^^^ ^° d° such

th^end!" ^' "'^''^ ^°" '' '^ ''''' ^^^ ^° "° happiness i'
_ Hetty said nothing : she felt a revival of hope at the men-
tion of a letter which Adam had not read. There would be
something quite different in it from what he thought.

2^2 ADAM BEDE.

Adam took out the letter, but he held it in his hand ..till,
while he said, in a tone of tender entreaty,

" Don't you bear me ill-will, Hetty, because I'm the means
o' bringing you this pain. God knows I'd ha' borne a good
deal worse for the sake o' sparing it you. And think — there's
nobody but me knows about this; and I'll take care of you
as if I was your brother. You're the same as ever to me, for
I don't believe you've done any wrong knowingly."

Hetty had laid her hand on the letter, but Adam did not
loose it till he had done speaking. She took no notice of
what he said — she had not listened ; but when he loosed the
letter she put it into her pocket, without opening it, and then
began to walk more quickly, as if she wanted to go in.

" You're in the right not to read it just yet,'" said Adam.
" Read it when you're by yourself. But stay out a little bit
longer, and let us call the children : you look so white and ill ;
your aunt may take notice of it."

Hetty heard the warning. It recalled toner the necessity
of rallying her native powers of concealment, which had half
given way under the shock of Adam's words. And she had
the letter in her pocket : she was sure there was comfort in
that letter, in spite of Adam. She ran to find Totty, and soon
reappeared with recovered color, leading Totty, who was
making a sour face, because she had been obliged to throw
away an unripe apple that she had set her small teeth in.

" Hegh, Totty," said Adam, "come and ride on my shoul-
der— ever so high — you'll touch the top o' the trees."

What little child ever refused to be comforted by that
glorious sense of being seized strongly and swung upward .''
I don't believe Ganymede cried when the eagle carried him
away, and perhaps deposited him on Jove's shoulder at the
end. Totty smiled down complacently from her secure height,
and pleasant was the sight to the mother's eyes, as she stood
at the house door and saw Adam coming with his small
burden.

" Bless your sweet face, my pet," she said, the mother's
strong love filling her keen eyes with mildness, as Totty
leaned forward and put out her arms. She had no eyes for
Hetty at that moment, and only said, without looking at her,
" You go and draw some ale, Hetty ; the gells are both at the
cheese."

After the ale had been drawn and her uncle's pipe lighted,
there was Totty to be taken to bed, and brought down again
in her night-gown, because she would cry instead of going to

ADAAf BEDS.

293

sleep. Then there was supper to be got ready, and Hetty
must be continually in the way to give help. Adam staid till
he knew Mrs. Poyser expected him to go, engaging her and
her husband in talk as constantly as he could, for the sake of
leaving Hetty more at ease. He lingered, because he wanted
to see her safely through that evening, and he was delighted
to find how much self-command she showed. He knew she
had not had time to read the letter, but he did not know she
was buoyed up by a secret hope that the letter would con-
tradict everything he had said. It was hard work for him to
leave her — hard to think that he should not know for days
how she was bearing her trouble. But he must go at last, and
all he could do was to press her hand gently as he said
" Good-by," and hope she would take that as a sign that if his
love could ever be a refuge for her, it was there the same as
ever. How busy his thoughts were, as he walked home, in
devising pitying excuses for her folly ; in referring all her
w-eakness to the sweet lovingness of her nature ; in
blaming Arthur, with less and less inclination to admit that
/lis conduct might be extenuated too ! His exasperation at
Hetty's suffering — and also at the sense that she was possibly
thrust forever out of his own reach — deafened him to any
plea for the miscalled friend who had wrought this misery.
Adam was a clear-sighted, fair-minded man — a fine fellow, in-
deed, morally as well as physically. But if Aristides the Just
was ever in love and jealous, he was at that moment not per-
fectly magnanimous. And I cannot pretend that Adam, in
these Dainful days, felt nothing but righteous indignation and
loving pity. He was bitterly jealous ; and in proportion as
his love made him indulgent in his judgment of Hetty, the
bitterness found a vent in his feeling toward Arthur.

" Her head was allays likely to be turned," he thought,
" when a gentleman, with his fine manners and fine clothes,
and his white hands, and that way o' talking gentlefolks have,
came about her, making up to her in a bold way, as a man
couldn't do that was only her equal ; and it's much if she'll
ever like a common man now." He could not help drawing
his own hands out of his pocket, and looking at them — at the
hard palms and the broken finger nails. " I'm a roughish fel-
low, altogether ; I don't know, now I come to think on't,
what there is much for a woman to like about me ; and yet I
might ha' got another wife easy enough, if I hadn't set my
heart on her. But it's little matter what other women think
about me, if she can't love me. She might ha' loved me, per*

294

ADAM BEDE.

haps, as likely as any other man — tb.ert's nobody hereabouts
as I'm afraid of, if he hadn't come between us ; but now I
shall belike be hateful to her because I'm so different to him.
And yet there's no telling — she may turn round the other
way, when she finds he's made light of her all the while. She
may come to feel the vally of a man as 'ud be thankful to be
bound to her all his life. But I must put up with it whichever
way it is — I've only to be thankful it's been no worse ; I'm
not th' only man that's got to do without much happiness i'
this life. There's many a good bit o' work done with a sad
heart. It's God's will, and that's enough for us ; we shouldn't
know better how things ought to be than He does, I reckon,
if we was to spend our lives i' puzzling. But it 'ud ha' gone
near to spoil my work for me, if I'd seen her brought to
sorrow and shame, and through the man as I've always been
proud to think on. Since I've been spared that, I've no right
to grumble. When a man's got his limbs whole he can bear
a smart cut or two."

As Adam was getting over a stile at this point in his re-
flections, he perceived a man walking along the field before
him. He knew it was Seth, returning from an evening preach-
ing, and made haste to overtake him.

" I thought thee'dst be at home before me," he said, as
Seth turned round to wait for him, "for I'm later than usual
to-night."

" Well, I'm later, too, for I got into talk, after meeting,
with John Barnes, who has lately professed himself in a state
of perfection, and I'd a question to ask him about his ex-
perience. It's one o' them subjects that lead you further than
y' e.xpect — they don't lie along the straight road."

They walked along together in silence two or three
minutes. Adam was not inclined to enter into the subtleties
of religious experience, but he was inclined to interchange a
word or two of brotherly affection and confidence with Seth.
That was a rare impulse in him, much as the brothers loved
each other. They hardly ever spoke of personal matters, or
uttered more than an allusion to their family troubles. Adam
was by nature reserved in all matters of feeling, and Seth
felt a certain timidity toward his more practical brother.

" Seth, lad," Adam said, putting his arm on his brother's
shoulder, " hast heard anything from Dinah Morris since she
went away."

" Yes," said Seth. " She told me I might write her a
word after a while, how we went on, and how mother bore up

ADAM BEDE.

under her trouble. So I wrote toJier a fortnight ago, and
told her about thee having a new employnient, and how n^thei
was more coiitented ; and last Wednesday, when I called at
uie post at Treddles'on, I found a letter from her. I think

rhn%>?f ^^'' ^?'''/° '"""^^'^ ^"^ I ^^id"^ say anything
about It, because thee'st seemed so full of other things It's
quite easy f read— she writes wonderful for a woman ""

Seth had drawn the letter from his pocket and held it out
to Adam, who said, as he took it,

''Ay, lad, I've got a tough load to carrv just now— thee
mustna take it ill if I'm a bit silenter and .crustier nor usual
1 rouble doesna make me care the less for thee. I know we
shall stick together to the last."

"I take nought ill o' thee, Adam ; I know well enough
what It means if thee't a bit short wi' me now and then "

Iheres mother opening the door to look out for us"
said Adam, as they mounted the slope. " She's been sittinV
1 thedark as usual. Well, Gyp, well ! art glad to see me "^
Lisbeth went in again quickly and lighted i candle for
she had heard the welcome rustling of footsteps on the grass
before Gyp's joyful bark. l^ i ic grass,

'' Eh ! my lads, th' hours war ne'er so long sin' I war born
as they n been this blessed Sunday night. What can ye both
ha been doin till this time.?" ^

"Thee shouldstna sit i' the dark, mother," said Adam,
that makes the time seem longer."
"Eh! what am I t' do wi'^burnin' candle of a Sundav
when there s on y me, and it's sin to do a bit o' knittin' ? Tlie
daylight s long enough for me to stare i' th' booke as I canna
wn.t .1 \^ ^ n"^ r^ ° shortenin' the time, to make it

waste the good candle. But which on vou's for ha'ing supper ?
Ye mun ayther be clemmed or full, I should think, s^ein' whai
time o' night it is."

little able which had been spread ever since it was li-ht

I ve had my supper," said Adam. " Here, G?p '"' he
added, taking some cold potato from the table, and rubbin-
the rough gray head that looked up toward him

" Thee needsna be gi'in' th' dog," said Lisbeth ; " I'n fed
him well a ready. I'm not like to forget him, I reckon, when
ne s all o thee I can get sight on."

_ ''Come, then, Gyp," said Adam, " we'll go to bed Good,
night, mother ; I'm verv tired."

" What ails him, dost know 1 " Lisbeth said to Seth when

2g6 ADAM BEDE.

Adam was gone up stairs. " He's like as if he was struck for
death this day or two — he's cast down. I found him i' the
shop this forenoon, arter thee wast gone, a-sittin' doin' noth-
ing— not so much as a booke afore him."

" He's a deal o' work upon him just now, mother," said
Seth, " and I think he's a bit troubled in his mind. Don't you
take notice of it, because it hurts him when you do. Be as
kind to him as you can, mother, and don't say anything to
vex him."

" Eh ! what dost talk o' my vexin' him ? an' what am I
like to be but kind ? I'll ma' him a kettle-cake for breakfast
i' the mornin'."

Adam had thrown off his coat and waistcoat, and was
reading Dinah's letter by the light of his dip candle.

" Dear Brother Seth, — Your letter lay three days beyond
my knowing of it at the Post, for I had not money enough by me
to pay the carriage, this being a time of great need and sickness
here, with the rains that have fallen, as if the windows of heaven
were opened again ; and to lay by money from day to-day, in such
a time, when there are so many in present need of all things, would
be a want of trust like the laying up of the manna. I speak of
this, because I would not have you think me slow to answer, or that
I had small joy in your rejoicing at the worldly good that has be-
fallen your brother Adam. The honor and love you bear him is noth-
ing but meet, for God has given him great gifts, and he uses them as
the patriarch Joseph did, who, when he was exalted to a place of
power and trust, yet yearned with tenderness toward his parent and
his younger brother.

" My heart is knit to your aged mother since it was granted me
to be near her in the day of trouble. Speak to her of me, and tell
her I often bear her in my thoughts at evening time, when I am
sitting in the dim light as I did with her, and we held one another's
hands, and I spoke the words of comfort that were given to me.
Ah ! that is a blessed time, isn't it, Seth, when the outward light is
fading, and the body is a little wearied with its work and its labor .''
Then the inward light shines the brighter, and we have a deeper
sense of resting on the Divine strength. I sit on my chair m the
dark room and close my eyes, and it is as if I was out of the body
and could feel no want for evermore. For then the very hardship,
and the sorrow, and the blindness, and the sin I have beheld and
been ready to weep over — yea, all the anguish of the children of
men, which sometmies wraps me round like a sudden darkness — I
can bear with a willing pain, as if I was sharing the Redeemer's
cross. For I feel it, I feel it — Infinite Love is suffering too — yea,
in the fullness of knowledge it suffers, it vearns, it mourns; and
that is a blind self-seeking which wants to be freed from the sorrow
wherewith the whole creation groaneth and travaileth. Surely it is

ADA.\r BEDE. ^^ ^

not true blessedness to be free from sorrow, while there is sorrow
and sin in the world : sorrow is then a part of love, and love does
not seek to throw it off. It is not the spirit only that tells me this
— I see it in the whole work and word of the gospel. Is there not
pleading in heaven? Is not the Man of Sorrows there in that
crucified body wherewith he ascended ? And is He not one with
the Infinite Love itself — as our love is one with our sorrow t

" These thoughts have been much borne in on me of late, and
I have seen with new clearness the meaning of those words, ' If
any man love me, let him take up my cross.' I have heard this
enlarged on as if it meant the troubles and persecutions we bring
on ourselves by confessing Jesus. But surely that is a narrow
thought. The true cross of the Redeemer was the sin and sorrow
of this world — that was what lay heavy on his heart — and that is
the cross we shall share wiih him, that is the cup we must drink of
with him, if we would have any part in that Divine Love which is
one with his sorrow.

" In my outward lot, which you ask about, I liave all things and
abound. 1 have had constant work in the mill, though some of the
other hands have been turned off for a time ; and my body is greatly
strengthened, so that I feel little weariness after long walking and
speaking. What you say about staying in yoiu- own country with
your mother and brother shows me that you have a true guidance :
your lot is appointed there by a clear showing, and to seek a
greater blessing eleswhere would be like laving a false offering on
the altar and expecting the fire from Heaven to kindle it. My work
and my joy are here among the hills, and I sometimes think I cling
too much to my life among the people here, and should be rebelli-
ous if I was called away.

" I was thankful for your tidings about the dear friends at the
Hall Farm ; for though I sent them a letter by my aunt's desire,
after I came back from my sojourn among them, I have had no
word from them. My aunt has not the pen of a ready writer, and
the work of the house is sufficient for the day, for she is weak in
body. Mv heart cleaves to her and her children as the nearest of
all to me in the flesh ; vea, and to all in that house. I am carried
awav to them continuallv in mv sleep, and often in the midst of
work and even of speech, the thought of them is borne in on me as
if they were in need and trouble, which yet is dark to me. There
may be some leading here ; but I wait to be taught. You say
they are all well.

" We shall see each other again in the body, I trust — though, it
may be, not for a long while ; for the brethren and sisters at Leeds
are desirous to have me for a short space among them, when
I have a door opened me again to leave Snowfield.

" Farewell, dear brother — and yet not farewell. For those chil-
dren of God whom it has been granted to see each other face to
face and to hold communion together and to feel the same spirit
working in both, can never more be sundered, thousjh the hills may
lie between. For their souls are enlarged forevermore by that

o ADAAf BEDE.

union, and they bear one another about in their thoughts continually
as it were a new strength.

" Your faitliful sister and fellow-worker in Christ,

"Dinah Morris.

" I have not skill to write the words so small as you do, and my
pen moves slow. And so I'am straitened, and say but little of
what is in my mind. Greet your mother for me with a kiss. She
asked me to kiss her twice when we parted."

Adam had refolded the letter, and was sitting meditatively
with his head resting on his arm at the head of the bed, vvU^«
Seth came up stairs.

" Hast read the letter ? '' said Seth.

" Yes," said Adam. " I don't know what I should ha
thought of her and her letter if I'd never seen her : I daresay
I should ha' thought a preaching woman hateful. But she's
one as makes everything seem right she says and does, and I
seemed to see her and hear her speaking when I read the let-
ter. It's wonderful how I remember her looks and her voice.
She'd make thee rare and happy, Seth ; she's just the woman
for thee."

" It's no use thinking o' that," said Seth, despondingly.
" She spoke so firm, and she's not the woman to say one thing
and mean another."

" Nay, but her feelings may grow different. A woman
may get to love by degrees — the best fire doesna flare up the
soonest. I'd have thee go and see her by and by : I'd make
it convenient for thee to be away three or four days, and it 'ud
be no walk for thee — only between twenty and thirty mile."

" I should like to see her again, whether or no, if she
would na be displeased with me for going," said Seth.

" She'll be none displeased," said Adam, emphatically,
getting up. " It might be a greater happiness to us all, if
she'd have thee, for mother took to her so wonderful, and
seemed so contented to be with her."

" Ay," said Seth, rather timidly, " and Dinah's fond o'
Hetty too ; she thinks a deal about her."

Adam made no reply to that, and, no other word but
" good-night " passed between them.

ADAM BEDE, 599

CHAPTER XXXI.
IN Hetty's bedchamber.

It was no longer light enough to go to bed withont a can-
dle, even in Mrs. Poyser's early household, and Hetty carried
one with her as she went up at last to her bedroom soon after
Adam was gone, and bolted the door behind her.

JMoiv she would read her letter. It must have comfort in
it. How was Adam to know the truth t It was always likely
he should say what he did say.

She set down the candle, and took the letter. It had a
faint scent of roses, which made her feel as if Arthur were
close to her. She put it to her lips, and a rush of remem-
bered sensations for a moment or two swept away all fear.
But her heart began to flutter strangely, and her hands to
tremble as she broke the seal. She read slowly ; it was not
easy for her to read a gentleman's handwriting, though Arthur
had taken pains to write plainly.

" Dearest Hetty, — I have spoken truly when I have said that
I loved you, and I shall never forget our love. I shall be your
true friend as long as life lasts, and I hope to prove this to you in
many ways. If I say anything to pain you in this letter, do not
think it is for want of love and tenderness toward you, for there is
nothing I would not do for you, if I knew it to be really for your
happiness. I cannot bear to think of my little Hetty shedding
tears when I am not there to kiss them away; and if I followed
only my own inclinations, I should be with her at this moment in-
stead of writing. It is very hard for me to part from her — harder
still for me to write words which may seem unkind, though they
spring from the truest kindness.

" Dear, dear Hetty, sweet as our love has been to me, sweet as
it would be to me for you to love me always, I feel that it would
have been better for us both if we had never had that happiness,
and that it is my duty to ask you to love me and care for me as
little as you can. The fault has all been mine, for, thouo;h I have
been unable to resist the longing to be near you, I have felt all the
while that your affection for me mis^ht cause you grief. I ought to
have resisted my feelings. I should have done so, if I had been a
better fellow than I am ; but now, since the past cannot be altered,
I am bound to save you from any evil that I have power to prevent.
And ! feel it would be a great evil for you if your affections
continued so fixed on me that you could think of no other man whp

300

ABAAI BEDE.

might be able to make you happier by his love than I ever can, and
if you continued to look toward something in the future which can-
not possibly happen. For, dear Hetty, it I were to do what you
nne day spoke of, and make you my wife, I should do what you
yourself would come to feel was for your misery instead of your
welfare. I know you can never be happy except by marrying a
man in your own station ; and if I were to marry you now, I should
only be adding to any wrong I have done, besides offending against
my duty in the other relations of life. You know nothing, dear
Hetty, of the world in which 1 must always live, and you would
soon begin to dislike me, because there would be so little in which
we should be alike.

" And since I cannot marry you, we must part — we must try
not to feel like lovers any more. 1 am miserable while 1 say this
but nothing else can be. Be angry with me, my sweet one ; I de-
serve it ; but do not believe that 1 shall not always care for you

always be grateful to you — always remember my Hetty ; and if anv
trouble should come that we do not now foresee, trust in me to do
everything that lies in my power.

'• I have told you where you are to direct a letter to, if you want
to write, but I put it down below lest you should have forgotten.
Do not write unless there is something I can really do for you; for,
dear Hetty, we must try to think of each other as little as we can.
Forgive me, and try to forget everything about me, except that I
shall be, as long as I live, your affectionate friend,

" Arthur Donnithorne."

Slowly Hetty had read this letter ; and when she looked
up from it there was the reflection of a blanched face in the
old dim glass — a white marble face with rounded childish
forms, but with something sadder than a child's pain in it.
Hetty did not see the face — she saw nothing — she only felt
that she was cold and sick and trembling. The letter shook
and rustled in her hand. She laid it down. It was a horrible
sensation — this cold and trembling ; it swept away the very
ideas that produced it, and Hetty got up to reach a warm
cloak from her clothes-press, wrapped it round her, and sat
as if she were thinking of nothing but getting warm. Pres-
ently she took up the letter with a firmer hand, and began
to read it through again. The tears came this time — great
rushing tears, that blinded her and blotched the paper. She
felt nothing but that Arthur was cruel — cruel to write so, cruel
not to marry her. Reasons why he could not marry her had
no existence for her mind ; how could she believe in any
misery that could come to her from the fulfillment of all she
had been longing for and dreaming of? She had not the
ideas that could make up the notion of that misery.

ADAM BEDE. ,01

As she threw down the letter again, she caught sight of
her face in the glass ; it was reddened now, and wet with
tears ; it was almost like a companion tliat she might com-
plain to — that would pity her. bhe leaned forward on her
elbows, and looked into those dark overflooding eyes, and
at that quivering mouth, and saw how the tears came thicker
and thicker, and how the mouth became convulsed with sobs.

The shattering of all her little dream world, the crushing
blow on her new-born passion, aflflicted her pleasure-craving
nature with an overpowering pain that annihilated all impulse
to resistance, and suspended her anger. She sat sobbing
till the candle went out, and then wearied, aching, stupefied
with crying, threw herself on the bed without undressing, and
w,nt to sleep.

There was a feeble dawn in the room whtn Hetty awoke, a
little after four o'clock, with a sense of dull nnsery, the cause
of which broke upon her gradually, as she began to discern
the objects round her in the dim light. And then came the
frightening thought that she had to conceal' her misery, as
well as to bear it, in this dreary daylight that was coming.
She could lie no longer ; she got up and went toward the
tal)le ; there lay the letter ; she opened her treasure drawer ;
there lay the earrings and the locket — the signs of all her
short happiness — the signs of the life-long dreariness that was
to follow it. Looking at the little trinkets which she had
once eved and fingered so fondly as the earnest of her future
paradise of finery, she lived back in the moments when
thev had been given to her with such tender caresses, such
strangely pretty words, such glowing looks, which filled her
with a bewildering delicious surprise — they were so much
sweeter than she had thought anything could be. And the
Arthur who had spoken to her and looked at her in this way,
who was present with her now — whose arm she felt round
her, his cheek against hers, his very breath upon her — was the
cruel, cruel Arthur who had written that letter — that letter
which she snatched and crushed and then opened again, that
she might read it once more. The half-benumbed mental
condition which was the effect of the last night's violent
crying, made it necessary to her to look asjain and see if her
wretched thoughts were actually true — if the letter was really
so cruel. She had to hold it close to the window, else she
could not have read it by the faint light. Yes ! it was worse
— it was more cruel. She crushed it up again in anger. She
hated the writer of that letter — hated him for the very reason

302

ADAM BEDE.

that she hung upon him with all her love — all the girlish pas-
sion and vanity that made up her love.

She had no tears this morning. She had wept them all
away last night, and now she felt that dry-eyed morning
misery which is worse than the first shock, because it has the
future in it as well as the present. Every morning to come,
as far as her imagination could stretch, she would have to get
up and feel that the day would have no joy for her. For'
there is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the
first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet
known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have
despaired and to have recovered hope. As Hetty began
languidly to take off the clothes she had worn all the night,
that she might wash herself and brush her hair, she had a
sickening sense that her life would go on in this way ; she
should always be doing tilings she had no pleasure in, getting
up to the old tasks of work, seeing people she cared nothing
about, going to church, and to Treddleston, and to tea with
Mrs. Best, and carrying no happy thought with her. For her
short poisonous delights had spoiled forever all the little
joys that had once made the sweetness of her life — the new
frock ready for Treddleston fair, the party at Mr. Britton's
at Broxton wake, the beaux that she would say " No " to for
a long while, and the prospect of the wedding that was to
come at last, when she would have a silk gown and a great
many clothes all at once. These things were all flat and
dreary to her now ; everything would be a weariness ; and
she would carry about forever a hopeless thirst and longing.

She paused in the midst of her languid undressing, and
leaned against the dark old clothes-press. Her neck and
arms were bare, her hair hung down in delicate rings, and
they w^ere just as beautiful as they were that night two months
ago, when she walked up and down this bedchamber glowing
with vanity and hope. She was not thinking of her neck and
arms now, even her own beauty vvas indifferent to her. Her
eyes wandered sadly over the dull old chamber, and then
looked out vacantly toward the growing dawn. Did a
remembrance of Dinah come across her mind ? Of her fore-
bodnig words, which had made her angry — of Dinah's affec-
tionate entreaty to think of her as a friend in trouble? No ;
the impression had been too slight t ) recur, Any affection
or comfort Dinah could have given her would have been as
indifferent to Hetty this morning as everything else was ex-
cept her bruised passion, She was only thinking she coul4

ADAM BEDE. 303

never stay here and go on with the old life ; she could better
bear something quite new than sinking back into the old
everyday round. She would like to run away that very morn-
ing, and never see any of the old faces again. But Hetty's
was not a nature to face difficulties — to dare to loose her hold
on the familiar and rush blindly on some unknown condition.
Here was a luxurious and vain nature, not a passionate one ;
and if she were ever to take any violent measure, she must be
urged to it by the desperation of terror. There was not much
room for her thoughts to travel in the narrow circle of her
imagination, and she soon fixed on the one thing she would
do to get away from her old life ; she would ask her uncle to
let her go to be a lady's-maid. Miss Lydia's maid would help
her to get a situation if she knew Hetty had her uncle's
leave.

When she had thought of this, she fastened up her hair and
began to wash ; it seemed more possible for her to go down
stairs and try to behave as usual. She would ask her uncle
this very day. On Hetty's blooming health it would take a
great deal of such mental suffering as hers to leave any deep
impress ; and when she was dressed as neatly as usual in her
working-dress, with her hair tucked up under her little cap, an
indiiTerent observer would have been more struck with the
young roundness of her cheek and neck, and the darkness of
her eyes and eyelashes, than with any signs of sadness about
her. But when she took up the crushed letter and put it in
her drawer, that she might lock it out of sight, hard, smarting
tears, having no relief in them, as the great drops had that fell
last night, forced their way into her eyes. She wiped them
away quickly ; she must not cry in the daytime ; nobody should
find out how miserable she was — nobody should know she was
disappointed about anything ; and the thought that the eyes
of her aunt and uncle would be upon her gave her the self-
command which often accompanies a dread. For Hetty looked
out from her secret misery toward the possibility of their ever
knowing what had happened, as the sick and weary prisoner
might think of the possible pillory. They would think her
conduct shameful, and shame was torture. That was poor
little Hetty's conscience.

So she locked up her drawer, and went away to her early
work.

In the evening, when Mr. Poyser was smoking his pipe,
and his goodnature was therefore at its superlative moment,
Hetty seized the opportunity of her aunt's absence to say,

304 ADAM BEDE.

" Unc^ie, I wish you'd let me go for a lady's-maid."

Mr. Peyser took the pipe from his mouth, and looked at
Hetty in mild surprise for some moments. She was sewing,
and went on with her work industriously.

" Why, what's put that into your head, my wench ? " he
said at last, after he had given one conservative puff.

" I should like it — I should like it better than farm*
work."

" Nay, nay ; you fancy so because you donna know it, my
wench. It wouldn't be half so good for your health nor for
your luck i' life. I'd like you to stay wi' us till you've got a
good husband ; you're my own niece, and I wouldn't have you
go to service, though it was a gentleman's house, as long as
I've got a home for you."

Mr. Poyser paused, and puffed away at his pipe.

" I like the needlework," said Hetty, " and I should get
good wages."

" Has your aunt been a bit sharp wi' you .'' " said Mr. Poy-
ser, not noticing Hetty's farther argument. " You mnstna
mind that, my wench — she does it for your good. She wishes
you well ; an' there isn't many aunts as are no kin to you 'ud
ha' done by you as she has."

"No, it isn't my aunt," said Hetty; "but I should like
the work better."

" It was all very well for you to learn the work a bit, an' I
gev my consent to that fast enough, sin' Mrs. Pomfret was will-
ing to teach you ; for, if anything was t' happen, it's well to
know how to turn your hand to different sorts o' things. But
I niver meant you to go to service, my wench ; my family's
ate their own bread and cheese as fur back as anybody knows,
hanna they, father ? You wouldna like your grandchild to
take wage ? "

" N-a-y," said old Martin, with an elongation of the word,
meant to make it bitter as well as negative, while he leaned
forward and looked down on the floor. " But the wench takes
arter her mother. I'd hard work t' hould/^(fr in, an' she mar-
ried i' spite o' me — a feller wi' on'y two head o' stock when
there should ha' been ten on's farm — she might well die o' th'
inflammation afore she war thirty."

It was seldom the old man made so long a speech ; but his
son's question had fallen like a bit of dry fuel on the embers
of a long unextinguished resentment, which had always made
the grandfather more indifferent to Hetty than to his son's
children. Her mother's fortune had been spent by that

ADAM BEDE.

305

good-for-naught Sorrel, and Hetty had Sorrel's blood in her
veins.

" Poor thing, poor thing ! " said Martin the younger, who
was sorry to have provoked this retrospective harshness.
" She'd but bad luck. But Hetty's got a good a chance o'
getting a solid, sober husband as any gell i' this country."

After throwing out this pregnant hint, Mr. Poyser recurred
to his pipe and his silence, looking at Hetty to see if she did
not give some sign of having renounced her ill-advised wish.
But, instead of that, Hetty, in spite of herself, began to cry,
half out of ill-temper at the denial, half out of the day's re-
pressed sadness.

" Hegh, hegh ! " said Mr. Poyser, meaning to check her
playfully, " don't let's have any crying. Crying's for them
as ha' got no home, not for them as want to get rid o' one.
What dost think ? " he continued to his wife, who now came
back into the house-place, knitting with fierce rapidity, as if
that movement were a necessary function, like the twittering
of a crab's antennae.

" Think ? why, I think we shall have the fowl stole before
we are much older, wi' that gell forgetting to lock the pens
up o' nights. What's the matter now, Hetly .'' What are you
crying at ? "

" Why, she's been wanting to go for a lady's-maid," said
Mr. Poyser. " I tell her we can do better for her nor that."

" I thought she's got some maggot in her head, she's gone
about wi' her mouth buttoned up so all day. It's all wi'
going so among them servants at the Chase, as we war fools
for letting her. She thinks it 'ud be a finer life than being
wi' them as are akin to her, and ha' brought her up sin' she
war no bigger nor Marty. She thinks there's nothing be-
longs to being a lady's-maid but wearing finer clothes nor she
was born to, I'll be bound. It's what rag she can get to stick
Dn her as she s thinking on from morning till night ; as I
often ask her if she wouldn't like to be the mawkin i' the
field, for then she'd be made o' rags inside an' out. I'll
never gi' my consent to her going for a lady's-maid while
she's got good friends to take care on her till she's married
to somebody better nor one o' them valets, as is neither a
common man nor a gentleman, an' must live on the fat o' the
land, an's like enough to stick his hands under his coat tails
and expect his wife to work for him."

" *'^j' - y»" said Mr. Poyser, " we must have a better hus-
band for her nor that, and there's better at hand. Corner

- 20

2o6 ADAM BEDE.

my wench, give over cryinoj, and get to bed. I'll do bette!
for you nor letting you go for a lady's-maid. Let's hear no
more on't."

When Hetty was gone up stairs he said,
" I canna make it out as she should want to go away, for
I thought she'd got a mind t' Adam Bede. She's looked like
it o' late."

"Eh! there's no knowing what she's got a liking to, for
things take no more hold on her than if she was a dried pea.
i believe that gell Molly — as is aggravatin' enough, for the
matter o' that — but 1 believe she'd care more about leaving
us and the children, for all she's been here but a year come
Michaelmas, nor Hetty would. But she's got this notion o'
^)eino- a lady's-maid wi' going among them servants — we
might ha' known what it 'ud lead to when we let her go to
learn the fine work. But Fll put a stop to it pretty quick,"

" Thee'dst be sorry to part wi' her, if it wasn't for her
good," said Mr. Poyser. " She's useful to thee i' the work."
" Sorry ? yis ; I'm fonder on her nor she deserves — a
little hard-hearted hussy, wanting to leave us i' that way. I
can't ha' had her about me these seven year, I reckon, and
done for her, and taught her everything, wi'out caring about
her. An' here I'm having linen spun, an' thinking all the
while it'll make sheeting and table-clothing for her when
she's married, an' she'll "live i' the parish wi' us, and never
no out of our sights, like a fool as I am for thinking aught
about her, as is no better nor a cherry wi' a hard stone in-
^ide it."

" Nay, nay, thee mustna make much of a trifle," said Mr.
Poyser, soothingly. "She's fond on us. I'll be bound ; but
she's young, an' gets things in her head as she can't rightly
^ive account on. Them young fillies 'uU run away often
wi'out knowing why."

Her uncle's answers, however, had had another eftect on
Hetty besides that of disappointing her and making her cry.
She knew quite well whom he had in his mind in his allusions
to marriage, and to a sober, solid husband ; and when she
was in her bedroom again, the possibility of her marryhig
Adam presented itself to her in a new light. In a mmd
where no strong: sympathies are at work, where there is no
supreme sense of right to which the agitated nature can cling
and steady itself to quiet endurance, one of the first results
of sorrow is a desperate vague clutching after any deed that
will change the actual condiuon. Pocr Hetty's vision of

ADAM BEDE.

307

consequences, at no time more than a narrow fantastic cal-
culation of her own probable pleasures and pains, was now
quite shut out by reckless irritation under present suffering,
and she was ready for one of those convulsive, motiveless
actions by which wretched men and women leap from a tem-
porary sorrow into a life-long misery.

Why should she not marry Adam ? She did not care
what she did, so that it made some change in her life. She
felt confident that he would still want to marry her, and any
farther thought about Adam's happiness in the matter had
never yet visited her.

" Strange ! " perhaps you will say, " this rush of impulse
toward a course that might have seemed the most repugnant
to her present state of mind, and in only the second night of
her sadness ! "

Yes the actions of a little trivial soul like Hetty's, strug-
gling amid the serious, sad destinies of a human being, are
strange. So are the motions of a little vessel without ballast
tossed about on a storrny sea. How pretty it looked with its
particolored sail in the sunlight, moored in the quiet bay !

" Let that man bear the loss who loosed it from its moor-
ings."

But that will not save the vessel— the pretty thing that
might have been a life-long joy.

CHAPTER XXXir.

MRS. POYSER " HAS HER SAY OUT."

The next Saturday evening there was much excited dis-
cussion at the Donnithorne Arms concerning an incident which
had occurred that very day — no less than a second appear-
ance of the smart man in top-boots, said by some to be a mere
farmer in treaty for the Chase Farm, by others to be the fu-
ture steward ; but by Mr. Casson himself, the personal witness
to the stranger's visit, pronounced contemptuously to be noth-
ing better than a bailiff, such as Satchell had been before him.
No one had thought of denying Mr, Casson's testimony to the
fact that he had seen the stranger, nevertr.^iess he proffered
various corroborating circumstat.ces.

" I see hira myself," he said ; " I see him coming along by

3o8 ADAM BEDE.

the Crab-tree meadow on a bald-faced boss. I'd just been t'
hev a pint — it was half after ten i' the forenoon, when I hev
my pint as reg'lar as the clock — and I says to Knowles, as druv
up with his wagon, ' You'll get a bit o' barley to-day, Knowles,'
I says, * if you look about you ; ' and then 1 went round by
the rick-yard, and towart the Treddles'on road ; and just as I
come up by the big ash-tree, I see the man i' top-boots com-
ing along on a bald-faced boss — I wish I may never stir if I
didn't. And I stood still till he come up, and I says, 'Good-
morning, sir,' I says, for I wanted to hear the turn of his
tongue, as I might know whether he was a this-country-man ; so
I says, 'Good morning, sir; it'll 'old hup for the barley this
morning, I think. There'll be a bit got bin, if we've good
luck.' And he says ; ' Eh ! ye may be raight, there's noo
tallin',' he says ; and I know'd by that " — here Mr. Casson
gave a wink — " as he didn't come from a hundred mile off.
I daresay he'd think me a hodd talker, as you LoAmshire
folks allays does hany wonn as talks the right language."

"The right language!" said Bartle Massey, contemptu-
ously. " You're about as near the right language as a pig's
squeaking is like a tune played on a key-bugle."

"Well, I don't know," answered Mr. Casson, with an an-
gry smile. " I should think a man as has lived among the
gentry from a b}', is likely to know what's the right language
pretty nigh as well as a schoolmaster."

" Ay, ay, man," said Bartle, with a tone of sarcastic con-
solation, " you talk the right language iox you. When Mike
Holdsworth's goat says ba-a-a, it's all right — it 'ud be unnat-
ural for it to make any other noise."

The rest of the party being Loamshire men, Mr. Casson
had the laugh strongly against him, and wisely fell back on
the previous question, which, far from being exhausted in a
single evening, was renewed in the church-yard before ser-
vice, the next day, with the fresh interest conferred on all
news when there is a fresh person to hear it ; and that fresh
hearer was Martin Poyser, who, as his wife said, " never went
boozin' with that set at Casson's, a-sittin' soakin'-in drink, and
looking as wise as a lot o' cod-fish wi' red faces."

It was probably owing to the conversation she had had
with her husband on their way from church, concerning this
problematic stranger, that Mrs. Poyser's thoughts immediately
reverted to him when, a day or two afterward, as she was
standing at the house door with her knitting, in that eager
leisure which came to her when the afternoon cleaning was

ADAM BEDE.

309

done, she saw the old squire enter the yard on his black pony,
followed by John the groom. She always cited it afterward as
a case of prevision, which really had something more in it
than her own remarkable penetration, that the moment she
set eyes on the squire, she said to herself, " I shouldna wonder
if he's come about that man as is a-going to take the Chase
Farm, wanting Poyser to do something for him without pay.
But Poyser's a fool if he does."

Something unwonted must clearly be in the wind, for the
old squire's visits to his tenantry were rare ; and though Mrs.
Poyser had during the last twelvemonth recited many imagin-
ary speeches, meaning even more than met the ear, which
she was quite determined to make to him the next time he ap-
peared within the gates of the Hall Farm, the speeches had
always remained imaginary.

" Good-day, Mrs. Poyser," said the old squire, peering at
her with his short-sighted eyes — a mode of looking at her
which, as Mrs. Poyser observed, " allays aggravated her ; it
was as if you was a insect, and he was going to dab his fin-
ger-nail on you."

However she said, " Your servant, sir," and courtesied with
an air of perfect deference as she advanced toward him ; she
was not the woman to misbehave toward her betters, and fiy
in the face of the catechism, without severe provocation.

" Is your husband at home, Mrs. Poyser ? "

" Yes, sir; he's only i' the rick-yard. I'll send for him in
a minute, if you'll please to get down and step in."

"Thank you ; I will do so. I want to consult him about
a little matter ; but you are quite as much concerned in it, if
not more. I must have your opinion too."

" Hetty, run and tell your uncle to come in," said Mrs. Poy-
ser, as they entered the house, and the old gentleman bowed
low in answer to Hetty's courtesy; while Totty, conscious of a
pinafore stained with gooseberry jam, stood hiding her face
against the clock, and peeping round furtively.

"What a fine old kitchen this is ! " said Mr. Donnithorne,
looking round admiringly. He always spoke in the same de-
liberate, well-chiseled, polite wa}', whether his words were
sugary or venomous. " And you keep it so exquisitely clean,
Mrs. Poyser. I like these premises, do you know, beyond
any on the estate."

" Well, sir, since you're fond of 'em, I should be glad if
you'd let a bit o' repairs be done to 'em, for the boarding's i'
that state, as we're likely to be eaten up wi' rats and mice }

3io

ADAM -^^L>E

and the cellar, you may stan' up to your knees i' the watej
in't if you like to go clown ; but perhaps you'd rather believe
my words. Won't you please to sit down, sir ? "

" Not yet ; I must see your dairy. I have not seen it for
years, and I hear on all sides about your fine cheese and but-
ter," said the squire, looking politely unconscious that there
could be any question on which he and Mrs. Poyser might
happen to disagree. " I think I see the door open, there ; you
must not be surprised if I cast a covetous eye on your cream
and butter. I don't expect that Mrs. Satchell's cream and
butter will bear comparison with yours."

I can't say, sir, I'm sure. It's seldom I see other folks's
butter, though there's some on it as no one need to see — the
smell's enough."

" Ah ! now this I like," said Mr. Donnithrone, looking
round at the damp temple of cleanliness, but keeping near the
door. "I'm sure I should like my breakfast better if I knew
the butter and cream came from his dairy. Thank you, that
really is a pleasant sight. Unfortunately, my slight tendency
to rheumatism makes me afraid of damp ; I'll sit down in your
comfortable kitchen. Ah! Poyser how do you do? In the
midst of business, I see, as usual. I've been looking at your
wife's beautiful dairy — the best manager in the parish, is she
not?"

Mr. Poyser had just entered in shirt-sleeves and open waist-
coat, with a face a shade redder than usual, from the exertion
of "pitching." As he stood, red, rotund, and radiant before
the small wiry, cool old gentleman, he looked like a pri2e ap-
ple by the side of a withered crab.

" Will you please to take this chair, sir?" he said, lifting
his father's arm-chair forward a little, " you'll find it easy."

" No, thank you, I never sit in easy-chairs," said the old
gentleman seating himself on a small chair near the door.
" Do you know, Mrs. Poyser — sit down, pray, both of you —
I've been far from contented, for some time, with Mrs.
Satchell's dairy management. I think she has not a good
method as you have."

" Indeed, sir, I can't speak to that," said Mrs. Poyser, in a
h-ard voice, rolling and unrolling her knitting, and looking icily
out of her window, as she continued to stand opposite the
squire. Poyser might sit down if he liked, she thought ; she
wasn't coing to sit down, as if she give in to any such smooth-
tongued palaver. Mr. Poyser, who looked and felt the reverse
of icy, did sit down in his three-cornered chair.

ADAM BEDE.

" And now, Poyser, as Satchell is laid up, I am intending
to let the Chase Farm to a respectable tenant. I'm tired ot
having a farm on my own hands — nothing is made the best of,
in such cases, as you know. A satisfactory bailiff is hard to
find ; and I think you and I, Poyser, and your excellent wife
here, can enter into a little arrangement in consequence, which
will be to our mutual advantage."

" Oh," said Mr. Poyser, with a good-natured blankness of
imagination as to the nature of the arrangement.

" If I'm called upon to speak, sir," said Mrs. Poyser, after
glancing at her husband with pity at his softness, " you know
better than me ; but I don't see what the Chase Farm is t' us
— we've cumber enough wi' our own farm. Not but what I'm
glad to hear o' anybody respectable coming into the parish ;
there's some as ha' been brought in as hasn't been looked on
i' that character."

" You're likely to find Mr. Thurle an excellent neighbor, I
assure you ; such a one as you will feel glad to have accommo-
dated by the little plan I'm going to mention • especially as I
hope you will find it as much to your own advantage as his."

" Indeed, sir, if it's anything t' our advantage, it'll be the
first offer o' the sort I've beared on. It's them that take ad-
vantage that get advantage i' this world, / think ; folks have
to wait long enough afore it's brought to 'em."

"The fact is, Poyser," said the squire, ignoring Mrs.
Poyser's theory of worldly prosperity, "there is too much
dairy-land, and too little plow-land, on the Chase Farm, to
suit Thurle's purpose — indeed, he will only take the farm on
condition of some change in it ; his wife, it appears, is not a
clever dairy-woman, like yours. Now, the plan I'm thinking
of is to effect a little exchange. If you were to have the
Hollow Pastures, you might increase your dairy, which must
be so profitable under your wife's management; and I should
request you, Mrs. Poyser, to supply my house with milk,
cream, and butter at the market prices. On the other hand,
Poyser, you might let Thurle have the Lower and Upper
Ridges, which really, with our wet seasons, would be a good
riddance for you. There is much less risk in dairy-land than
corn-land."

Mr. Poyser was leaning forward with his elbows on his
knees, his head on one side, and his mouth screwed up —
apparently absorbed in making the tips of his fingers meet so
as to represent with perfect accuracy the ribs of a ship. He
Was much too acute a man not to see through the whole busi-

3J:

ADAM BEDE.

ness, and to foresee perfectly what would be his wife's view
of the subject ; but he disliked giving unpleasant answers ;
unless it was on a point of farming practice, he would rather
give up than have a quarrel, any day ; and after all, it mat-
tered more to his wife than to him. So after a few moments'
silence, he looked up at her and said mildly, " What dost
say ? "

Mrs. Poyser had had her eyes fixed on her husband with
cold severity during his silence, but now she turned away her
head with a toss, looked icily at the opposite roof of the cow-
shed, and, spearing her knitting together with the loose pin,
held it firmly between her clasped hands.

" Say ? Why, I say you may do as you like about giving
up any o' your corn-land, afore your lease is up, which it won't
be for a year come ne.Kt Michaelmas Lady-day, but I'll not
consent to take more dairy work into my hands, either for
love or money ; and there's nayther love nor money here, as
1 can see, on'y other folks's love o' theirselves, and the money
as is to go into other folks's pockets. I know there's them as
is born t' own the land, and them as is born to sweat on 't,"
— here Mrs. Poyser paused to gasp a little — "and I know
it's christened folks's duty to submit to their betters as fur as
flesh and blood 'ull bear it ; but I'll not make a martyr o'
myself, and wear myself to skin and bone, and worret myself
as if I was a churn wi' butter a-coming in't, for no landlord in
England, not if he was King George himself."

" No, no, my dear Mrs. ■ oyser, certainly not," said the
squire, still confident in his own powers of persuasion ; " you
must not overwork yourself ; but don't you think your work
will rather be lessened than increased in this way ? There
is so much milk required at the Abbey, that you will have
little increase of cheese and butter making from the addition
to your dairy ; and I believe selling the milk is the most prof-
itable way of disposing of dairy produce, is it not t "

" Ay, that's true," said Mr. Poyser, unable to repress an
opinion on a question of farming profits, and forgetting that
it was not in this case a purely abstract question.

" I dare say," said Mrs. Poyser bitterly, turning her head
half way toward her husband, and looking at the vacant arm-
chair— '' I dare say it's true for men as sit i' th' chimney-
corner and make believe as everything's cut wi' ins an' outs
to fit int' everything else. If you could make a pudding wi'
thinking o' the batter, it 'ud be easy getting dinner. How do
I know whether tlie milk 'ull be wanted constant ? What's to

ADAM BEDE. ,j,

make me sure as the house won't be put o' board-wage afore
we're many months older, and then I may have to He awake
o' nights wi' twenty gallons o' milk on my mind — and Dingall
'ull take no more butter, let alone paying for it ; and we
must fat pigs till we're obliged to beg the butcher en our
knees to buy 'em, and lose half of 'em wi' the measles. And
there's the fetching and carrying, as 'ud be w^elly half a day's
work for a man an' hoss — thafs to be took out o' the profits,
I reckon ? but there's folks 'ud hold a sieve under the pump
and expect to carry away the water."

" That difficulty — about the fetching and carr}ang — you
will not have, Mrs. Poyser," said the squire, who thought that
this entrance into particulars indicated a distant inclination
to compromise on Mrs. Poyser's part — " Bethell will do that
regularly with the cart and pony."

" Oh, sir, begging your pardon, I've never been used t'
having gentlefolks' sen-ants coming about my back places, a-
making love to both the gells at once, and keeping 'em with
their hands on their hips listening to all manner o' gossip
when they should be down on their knees a-scouring. If
we're to go to ruin, it shanna be wi' having our back kitchen
tumed into a public."

"Well, Poyser," said the squire, shifting his tactics, and
looking as if he thought Mr. Poyser had suddenly withdrawn
from the proceedings and left the room, " you can turn the
Hollows into feeding-land. I can easily make another ar-
rangement about supplying my house. And I shall not forget
your readiness to accommodate your landlord as well as a
neighbor. I know you will be glad to have your lease re-
newed for three years, when the present one expires ; other-
wise, I dare say Thurle, who is a man of some capital, would
be glad to take both the farms, as they could be worked so
well together. But I don't want to part with an old tenant
like you."

To be thrust out of the discussion in this way would have
been enough to complete Mrs. Poyser's exasperation,- even
without the final threat. Her husband, really alarmed at the
possibility of their leaving the old place where he had been
bred and born — for he believed tlie old squire had small
spite enough for anything — was beginning a mild remon-
strance explanatory of the inconvenience he should find in
having to buy and sell more stock, with,

"Well, sir, I think as it's rether hard" .... when Mrs.
Poyser burst in with the desperate determination to have h«r

3*4

ADAM BEDE.

say out this once, though it were to rain notices to quit, and
the only shelter w^re the work-house.

" Then, sir, if I may speak — as, for all I'm a woman,
and there's folks as thinks a woman's fool enough to Stan' by
an' look on while the men sign her soul away, I've a right to
speak, for I make one quarter o' the rent, and save th' other
quarter — I say, if Mr. Thurle's so ready to take farms under
you it's a pity but what he should take this, and see if he likes
to live in a house wi' all the plagues o' Eg)-pt in 't — wi' the
cellar full o' water, and frogs and toads hoppin' up the steps
by dozens — and the floors rotten, and the rats and mice gnaw-
ing ever}' bit o' cheese, and runnin' over our heads as we
lie i' bed till we expect 'em to eat us up alive — as its a mercy
they hanna eat the children long ago. I should like to see if
there's another tenant besides Poyser as 'ud put up w never
having a bit o" repairs done till a place tumbles down — and
not then, on'y wi' begging and praying, and having to pay
half — and being strung up wi' the rent as it's much if he gets
enough out o' the land to pay, for all he's put his own money into
the ground beforehand. See if you'll get a stranger to lead
such a life here as that ; a maggot must be bom i' the rotten
cheese to like it, I reckon. You may run away from my words,
sir," continued Mrs. Poyser, following the old squire beyond
the door — for after the first moments of stunned surprise he
had got up, and waving his hand toward her with a smile, had
walked out toward his pony. But it was impossible for him to
get away immediately, for John was walking the pony up and
down the yard, and was some distance from the causeway when
his master beckoned.

" You may run away from my words, sir, and you may go
spinnin' underhand ways o' doing us a mischief, for you've got
old Hany to your friend, though nobody else is, but I tell you
for once as we're not dumb creaturs to be abused and made
monevii^n by them as ha' got the lash i' their hands, for want
o' knowing how t' undo the tackle. An' if I'm th' only one
as speaks my mind, there's plenty o' the same way o' thinking
i' this parish and the next to t', for your name's no better than
a brimstone match in ever\-body' nose — if it isna two three
old folks as you think o' saving your soul by giving 'em a bit
o' flannel and a drop o' porridge. An' ycu may be right i'
thinking it '11 take but little to save your soul, for it '11 be the
smallest savin' y' iver made, wi' all your scrapin'."

There are occasions on which two servant-girls and a wag-
oner may be a formidable audience, and as the squire rode

ADAM BEDE. 3,5

away on his black pony, even the gift of short-sightedness did
not prevent him from being aware that Molly, and Nancy, and
Tim were grinning not far from him. Perhaps he suspected
that sour old John was grinning behind him — which was also
the fact. Meanwhile the bull-dog, the black-and-tan terrier,
Alick's sheep-dog, and the gander hissing at a safe distance
from the pony's heels, carried out the idea of Mrs. Poyser's
? j\o in an impressive quartette.

Mrs. Poyser, however had no soner seen the pony movf
off than she turruid round, gave the two hilarious damsels a
look which drove them into the back kitchen, and, unspearing
her knitting, began to knit again with her usual rapidit)-, aj
she re-entered the house.

" Thee'st done it now," said Mr. Po3-ser, a little alarmed
and uneasy, but not without some triumphant amusement al
his w'fe's outbreak.'

"Yes, I know I've done it," said Mrs. Povser; "but I've
had my say out, and I shall be th' easier fo 't all my life.
There's no pleasure i' living if you're to te corked up foi
iver, and only dribble your mind out by the sly, like a leaky
barrel. I shan't repent saying what I think, if I live to be a^
old as th' old squire ; and there's little likelihoods — for il
seems as if them as aren't wanted here are th' only folks as
aren't wanted i' th' other world.

" But thee wotna like moving from th' old place, this
Michaelmas tweh-enionth," said Mr. Poyser, "and going into
a strange parish, where thee know'st nobody. It'll be hard
upon us both, and upo' father too."

"Eh : it's no use worreting ; there's plenty o' things may
happen between this and Michaelmas t\. 1 enr.onih. Tht.
captain may be master afore then, for what we know," said
Mrs. Poyser, inclined to take an unusually hoptful view of an
embarrassment which had been brought about by her owj
merit, and not by other people's fault.

''lam none for worreting," said Mr. Poyser, rising from
his three-cornered chair and walking slowly toward the door
"but I should be loath to leave th' old place, and the pavish
where I was bred and born, and father afore me. We should
feave our roost behind us, I doubt, anci never thrive again."

31 6 ADAM BEDE.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

MORE LINKS.

The barley was all carried at last, and the harvest suppers
went by without waiting for the dismal black crop of beans.
The apples and nuts were gathered and stored ; the scent of
whey departed from the farm-houses, and the scent of brewing
came in its stead. The woods behind the Chase, and all the
hedgerow trees, took on a solemn splendor under the dark
low-hanging skies. Michaelmas was come, with its fragrant
basketfuls of purple damsons, and its paler purple daisies,
and its lads and lasses leaving or seeking service, and winding
along between the yellow hedges, with their bundles under
their arms. But though Michaelmas was come, Mr. Thurle,
that desirable tenant, did not come to the Chase Farm, and
the old squire, after all, had been obliged to put in a new
bailifiE. It was known throughout the two parishes that the
squire's plan had been frustrated because the Poysers had
refused to be " put upon," and Mrs. Peyser's outbreak was
discussed in all the farm-houses with a zest which was only
heightened by frequent repetition. The news that " Bony "
was come back from Egypt was comparatively insipid, and the
repulse of the French in Italy was nothing to Mrs. Peyser's
repulse of the old squire. Mr. Irwine had heard a version of
it in every parishioner's house with the one exception of the
Chase. But since he had always, with marvellous skill, avoided
any quarrel with Mr. Donnithorne,he could not allow himself
the pleasure of laughing at the old gentleman's discomfiture
with any one besides his mother, who declared that if she
were rich she should like to allow Mrs. Poyser a pension for
life, and wanted to invite her to the Parsonage, that she
. might hear an account of the scene from Mrs. Peyser's own
lips.

" No, no, mother," said Mr. Irwine ; "it was a little bit of
irregular justice on Mrs. Peyser's own part, but a magistrate
like me must not countenance irregular justice. There must
be no report spread that I have taken notice of the quarrel,
else I shall lose the little good influence I have over the old
man."

" Well, I like that woman even better than her cream

ADAM BEDE. ^i

cheeses," said Mrs. Irwine. " She has the spirit of three
men, with that pale face of hers : and she says such sharp
things too."

" Sharp ! yes, her tongue is like a new-set razor. She's
quite original in her talk too ; one of those untaught wits that
help to stock a country with proverbs. I told you that capital
thing I heard her say about Craig — that he was like a cock
who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow. Now that's
an ^sop's fable in a sentence."

" But it will be a bad business if the old gentleman turns
them out of the farm next Michaelmas, eh.?" said Mrs.
Irwine.

" Oh, that must not be ; and Poyser is such a good tenant,
that Donnithorne is likely to think twice and digest his
spleen rather than turn them out. But if he should give them
notice at Lady-day, Arthur and I must move heaven and
earth to mollify him. Such old parishioners as they are must
not go."

" Ah ! there's no knowing what may happen before Lady-
day," said Mrs. Irwine. " It struck me on Arthur's birthday
that the old man was a little shaken : he's eighty-three, you
know. It's really an unconscionable age. It's only women
who have a right to live as long as that."

" When they've got old-bachelor sons who would be forlorn
without them," said Mr. Irwine, laughing and kissing his
mother's hand.

Mrs. Poyser, too, met her husband's occasional forebodings
of a notice to quit with " There's no knowing what may hap-
pen before Lady-day : " one of those undeniable general prop-
ositions which are usually intended to convey a particular
meaning very far from undeniable. But it is really too hard
upon human nature that it should be held a criminal offence
to imagine the death even of a king when he is turned eighty-
three. It is not to be believed that any but the dullest Brit-
ons can be good subjects under that hard condition.

Apart from this foreboding, things went on much as usual
in the- Poyser household. Mrs. Poyser thought she noticed a
surprising improvement in Hetty. To be sure, the girl got
closer tempered, and sometimes she seemed as if there'd be
no drawing a word from her with cart-ropes ; " but she thought
much less about her dress, and went after the work quite
eagerly, without any telling. And it was wonderful how she
never wanted to go out now — indeed, could hardly be per-
suaded to go ; and she bore her aunt's putting a stop to her

3i8

ADAM BEDE.

weekfy lesson in fine-work at the Chase, without the least
grumbling or pouting. It must be, after all, that she had set
her heart on Adam at last, and her sudden freak of wanting
to be a lady's maid must have been caused by some little
pique or misunderstanding between them, which had passed
by. For whenever Adam came to the Hall Farm, Hetty
seemed to be in better spirits, and to talk more than at other
times, though she was almost sullen when Mr. Craig or any
other admirer happened to pay a visit there.

Adam himself watched her at first with trembling anxiety,
which gave way to surprise and delicious hope. Five days
after delivering Arthur's letter, he had ventured to go to the
Hall Farm again — not without dread least the sight of him
might be painful to her. She was not in the house-place when
he entered, and he sat talking to Mr. and Mrs. Poyser for a
few minutes, with a heavy fear on his heart that they might
presently tell him Hetty was ill. But by and by there came
a light step that he knew, and when Mrs. Poyser said, " Come,
Hetty, where have you been 1 " Adam was obliged to turn
round, though he was afraid to see the changed look there
must be in her face. He almost started when he saw her
smiling as if she were pleased to see him — looking the same
as ever at a first glance, only that she had her cap on, which
he had never seen her in before when he came of an evening.
Still, when he looked at her again and again as she moved
about or sat at her work, there was a change ; the cheeks
were as pink as ever, and she smiled as much as she had ever
done of late, but there was something different in her eyes, in
the expression of her face, in all her movements, Adam thought
— something harder, older, less child-like. " Poor thing ! "
he said to himself, " that's allays likely. It's because she's
had her first heartache. But she's got a spirit to bear up
under it. Thank God for that."

As the weeks went by and he saw her always looking
pleased to see him — turning up her lovely face toward him as
if she meant him to understand that she was glad for him to
come — and going about her work in the same equable way,
making no sign of sorrow, he began to believe that her feeling
toward Arthur must have been much slighter than he had
imagined in his first indignation and alarm, and that she had
been able to think of her girlish fancy that Arthur was in love
with her, and would marry her. was a folly of which she was
timely cured. And it perhaps was, as he had sometimes, in his
more cheerful moments hoped it would be — her heart was

ADAM BEDE.

319

really turning with all the more warmth toward the man she
knew to have a serious love for her.

Possibly you think that Adam was not at all sagacious in
his interpretations, and that it was altogether extremely un-
becoming in a sensible man to behave as he did — falling in
love with a girl who really had nothing more than her beauty
to recommend her, attributing imaginary virtues to her, and
even condescending to cleave to her after she had fallen in
love with another man, waiting for her kind looks as a patient
trembling dog waits for his master's eye to be turned upon
him. But in so complex a thing as human nature, we must
consider it is hard to find rules without exceptions. Of course
I know that, as a rule, sensible men fall in love with the most
sensible women of their acquaintance, see through all the
pretty deceits of coquettish beauty, never imagine themselves
loved when they are not loved, cease loving on all proper
occasions, and marry the woman most fitted for them in every
respect — indeed, so as to compel the approbation of all the
maiden ladies in their neighborhood. But even to this rule
an exception will occur now and then in the lapse of centuries,
and my friend Adam was one. For my own part, however,
I respect him none the less ; nay, I think the deep love he
had for that sweet, rounded, blossom-like, dark-eyed Hetty,
of whose inward self he was really very ignorant, came out of
the very strength of his nature and not out of any inconsistent
weakness. Is it any weakness, pray, to be wrought on by
exquisite music ? to feel its wondrous harmonies searching
the subtlest windings of your soul, the delicate fibres of life
where no memory can penetrate, and binding together your
whole being past and present in one unspeakable vibration ;
melting you in one moment with all the tenderness, all the
love that has been scattered through the toilsome years, con-
centrating in one emotion of heroic courage or resignation
all the hard-learned lessons of self-renouncing sympathy,
blending your present joy with past sorrow, and your present
sorrow with all your past joy ? If not, then neither is it a
weakness to be so wrought upon by the exquisite curves of a
woman's cheek and neck and arms, by the liquid depths of
her beseeching eyes, or the sweet childish pout of her lips.
For the beauty of a lovely woman is like music ; what can
one say more ? Beauty has an expression beyond and far
above the one woman's soul that it clothes, as the words of
genius have a wider meaning than the thought that prompted
them : it is more than a woman's love that moves us in a

320

ADAM BEDE,

woman's eyes — it seems to be a far-off, mighty love that has
come near to us, and made speech for itself there ; the
rolinded neck, the dimpled arm, move us by something more
than their prettiness — by their close kinship with all we have
known of tenderness and peace. The noblest nature sees
the most of this imJ>ersona/ (expression in beauty (it is needless
to say that there are gentlemen, with whiskers dyed and un-
dyed, who see none of it whatever), and, for this reason, the
noblest nature is often the most blinded to character of the
one woman's soul that the beauty clothes. Whence, I fear the
tragedy of human life is likely to continue for a long time to
come, in spite of mental philosophers who are ready with the
best receipts for avoiding all mistakes of the kind.

Our good Adam had no fine words into which he could
put his feeling for Hetty ; he could not disguise mystery in
in this way with the appearance of knowledge ; he called his
love frankly a mystery, as you have heard him. He only
knew that the sight and memory of her moved him deeply,
touching the spring of all love and tenderness, all faith and
courage within him. How could he imagine narrowness,
selfishness, hardness in her? He created the mind he be-
lieved in out of his own, which was large, unselfish, tender.

The hopes he felt about Hetty softened a little his feeling
toward Arthur. Surely his attentions to Hetty must have
been of a slight kind ; they were altogether wrong, and such
as no man in Arthur's position ought to have allowed himself,
but they must have had an air of playfulness about them,
which had probably blinded him to their danger, and bad pre-
vented them from laying any strong hold on Hetty's heart.
As the new promise of happiness rose for Adam, his indigna-
tion and jealousy began to die out ; Hetty was not made un-
happy ; he almost believed that she liked him best ; and the
thought sometimes crossed his mind that the friendship which
had once seemed dead forever might revive in the days to come,
and he would not have to say "good-by" to the grand old
woods, but would like them better because they were Arthur's.
For this new promise of happiness, following so quickly on
the shock of pain, had an intoxicating effect on the sober
Adam, who had all his life been used to much hardship and
moderate hope. Was he really going to have an easy lot
after all ? It seemed so ; for at the beginning of November
Jonathan Burge, finding it impossible to replace Adam, had
at last made up his mind to offer him a share in his business,
without farther condition than that he should continue to

ADAM BEDE. ,2i

give his energies to it, and renounce all thought of having a
separate business of his own. Son-in-law or no son-in-law,
Adam had made himself too necessary to be parted with, and
his head-work was so much more important to Burge than his >
skill in handicraft, that his having the management of the '
woods made little difference in the value of his services ; and /
as to the bargains about the squire's timber, it would be' easy''
to call in a third person. Adam saw here an opening into a
broadening path of prosperous work, such as he had thought
of with ambitious longing ever since he was a lad ; he might
come to build a bridge, or a town-hall, or a factory, for he
had always said to himself that Jonathan Surge's buildin<y
business was like an acorn, which might be the mother of a
great tree. So he gave his hand to Burge on that bargain,
and went home with his mind full of happy visions, in which
(my refined reader will perhaps be shocked when I sav it) the
image of Hetty hovered and smiled over plans for seasoning
timber at a trifling expense, calculations as to the cheapening '
of bricks per thousand by water carriage, and a favorite '
scheme for the strengthening of roofs and walls with a pecu-
lar form of iron girder. What then ? Adam's enthusiasm
lay in these things ; and our love is inwrought in our enthusi-
asm as electricity is inwrought in the air, exalting its power
by a subtle presence.

Adam would be able to take a separate house now and
provide for his mother in the old one ; his prospects would
justify his marrying very soon, and if Dinah consented to have
Seth, their mother would perhaps be more contented to live
apart from Adam. But he told himself that he would not be
hasty— he would not try Hetty's feeling for him until it had
time to grow strong and firm. However, to-morrow, after
church, he would go to the Hall Farm and tell them the news.
Mr. Poyser, he knew, would like it better than a five-pound
note, and he should see if Hettv's eves brightened at it. The
months would be short with all he had to fill his mind, and
this foolish eagerness which had come over him of late' must
not hurrv him into any premature words. Yet when he got
home and told his mother the good news, and at his supp'er
while she sat by almost crying for jov. and wanting him to
eat twice as much as usual because of his trood luck,' he could
not help preparing her gently for the coming change, by talk-
nig of the old house being too small for them all to go on liv-
ing m it always.

322

ADAM BEDE.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

THE BETROTHAL.

It was a dry Sunday, and really a pleasant day for the 2d
of November. There was no sunshine, but the clouds were
high, and the wind was so still that the yellow leaves whicii
fluttered down from the hedgerow elms must have fallen from
pure decay. Nevertheless, Mrs. Poyser did not go tochuich,
for she had taken a cold too serious to be neglected ; only
two winters ago she had been laid up for weeks with a cold ;
and since his wife did not go to church, Mr. Poyser considered
that on the whole it ^^ould be as well for him to stav away
too and " keep her company." He could, perhaps^ have
given no precise form to the reasons that determined this
conclusion ; but it is well known to all experienced minds that
our firmest convictions are often dependent on subtle im-
pressions for which words are quite too coarse a medium.
However it was, no one from the Poyser family went to cliurch
that afternoon except Hetty and the boys ; yet Adam was
bold enough to join them after church, and say that he would
walk home with them, though all the way through the village
<ie appeared to be chiefly occupied with Marty and Tcmmy,
telling them about the squirrels in Binton Coppice, and prem-
ising to take them there someday. But when they came to the
fields, he said to the boys, " Now, then, which is the stoutest
walker ? Him as gets to th' home-gate first shall be the
first to go with me to Binton Coppice on the donkey. But
Tommy must have the start up to the next stile, because he's
the smallest."

Adam had never behaved so much like a determined lover
before. As soon as the boys had both set off, he looked dow n
at Hetiy and said, " Won't you hang on my arm, Hettv? " in
a pleading tone, as if he had already asked her and she had
refused. Hetty looked up at him smilingly and put her round
arm through his in a moment. It was nothing to her — putting
her arm through Adam's ; but she knew he cared a great deal
about having her arm through his, and she wished him to care.
Her heart beat no faster, and she looked at the half-bare
hedgerows and the ploughed field with tlie same sense of op-
pressive dulness as before. But Adam scarcely felt that he

ADAM BEDE.

was walking ; he thought Hetty must know that he was press-
ing her arm a httle-a very little ; words rushed to his lip? that
he dared not utter-that he had made up his mind not to ut e
yet ; and so he was silent for the length of that field The
calm patience with which he had once waited for Hetty's love
conten; only with her presence and the thought of the future'
had forsaken him since that terrible shock nelrH- three months
ago. The agitations of jealousy had given a new restlessness

to hJrT::^"^ ?f' ''^l ^"^ uncertainty too hard almo
to bear Bu though he might not speak to Hetty of his love
he would tell her about his new prospects, and see if she

Tdf fo t:ik^'re\td, '°' ^^''^" '-' '-'' ^"^"^^^ --^- °^ ^-

"rm going to tell your uncle some news that'll surDrise
him Hetty; and I think he'll be glad to hear it too."^

^^ What s that ? " Hetty said, indifferently.
Why, Mr. Burge has offered me a share in his business
and I m going to take it." uamc^:,,

H„7!T ''^' ^ ''^^"^^ ^" ^^"y'^ face, certainly not pro-
duced by any agreeable impression from this newsf In fac°
she fe t a momentary annoyance and alarm ; for she had so
often heard it hinted by her uncle that Adan. might have Mar?
Burge and a share in the business any day if he liked hS
she associated the two objects now, ind t'he thought Imme-
d ate ly occurred that perhaps Adam had given her up because
of what had happened lately, and had turned toward Ma^
Burge. With that thought, and before she had time to rZ
member any reasons why it could not be true, came a new
sense of forsakenness and disappointment: the one thin"-!
the one person-her mind had rested on in its dull wearin^ess
wid.tL' '.r''''°'", ''V^ ^'"^ P'^^'^'^' misery filled her eyes
he f n. ; If T ^^^'^^"^ °" '^'' ground, but Adam saw
'^ Hetr 'h ' S^ ''^''' ^"^ ^^f°^e ^'^ ^'^^ finished saying,

to ll- n an'Jf h' "' ^"" throu.^h all tL Causes conceh^%Te
ho ll M '^ "' '"'^ "^^Shted on half the true one. Hetty

I ought he was going to marrv Mary Burge-she didn't like

CherZu7~Fu'^'''^' '^'' ''^^"'^ ^''^^ hi"^ to marrv anyone
wa. Z ■ / caution was swept away— all reason for it
was gone and Adam could feel nothing but trembling joy.
we kaned toward her and took her hand, as he <=aid

I could afford to be married now, Hetty— I could make
a wife comfortable ; but I shall never want to be married if
you won't have me."

ADAM BEDE.

Hetty loo^<ed up at him and smiled through her tears, as
she had done to Arthur that first evening in the wood, when
she had thought he was not coming, and ytt he came. It was
a feebler relief, a feebler triumph she felt now, but the great
dark eyes and the sweet lips were as beautiful as ever, per-
haps more beautiful, for there was a more luxuriant woman-
liness about Hetty of late. Adam could hardly believe in
the happiness of that moment. His right hand held her left,
and he pressed her arm close against his heart as he leaned
down toward her.

" Do you really love me, Hetty ? Will you be my own
wife, to love and take care of as long as I live ? "

Hetty did not speak, but Adam's face was very close to
hers, and she put up her round cheek against his, like a kitten.
She wanted to be caressed — she wanted to feel as if Arthur
were with her again.

Adam cared for no words after that, and they hardly spoke
through the rest of the walk. He only said, " I may tell your
uncle and aunt, mayn't I, Hetty? " and she said " Yes."

The red fire-light on the hearth at the Hall Farm shone
on joyful faces that evening, when Hetty was gone up stairs
and Adam took the opportunity of telling Mr. and Mrs. Poy-
ser and the grandfather that he saw his way to maintaining a
wife now, and that Hetty had consented to have him.

" I hope you've no objections against me for her husband,"
said Adam ; " I'm a poor man as yet, but she shall want noth-
ing as I can work for." " Objections } " said Mr. Poyser,
while the grandfather leaned forward and brought out his long
" Nay, nay." " What objections can we ha' to you, lad ? Never
mind your being poorish as yet ; there's money in your head-
piece as there's money i' the sown field, but it must ha' time.
You'n got enough to begin on, and we can do a deal tow'rt
the bit o' furniture you'll want. Thee'st got feathers and linen
to spare— plenty, eh ? "

This question was of course addressed to Mrs. Poyser,
who was wrapped up in a warm shawl, and was too hoarse to
speak with her usual facility. At first she only nodded em-
phatically, but she was presently unable to resist the tempta-
tion to be more explicit.

" It 'ud be a poor tale, if I hadna feathers and linen," she
said hoarsely, "when I never sell a fowl but what's plucked,
and the wheel's a-going every day o' the week."

" Come, my wench," said Mr. Poyser, when Hetty came
down, " come and kiss us, and let us wish you luck."

ADAM BEDE.

325

man.

Hetty went very quietly and kissed the big, good-natured

" There ! '' he said, patting her on the back, " go and kiss
Tnw" ,f ""^ ^-f ' g^^"df^ther. I'm as wishful ?' have you
aun I'lTbe'h ^^ >?V^^\T 7'" ^^"^'^^^^^^ ^^ so' /our

Hettv as if von'd h "Y^ ^'°"' ^>^ >'°" '^'' seven 'ear,
hlett), as If voud been her own. Come, come now " he

Tt and'dron"-^^'°'?f!'f^ ^°°" ^' «^">' h^d 'l^i-ed he^

Hetty turned away, smiling, toward her empty chair
"else^;r;n^t;^'am:n.''^'^ °"^'" ^^^^^^^^ Mr. Poyser,

f.ii'^'^''™Tf°^ "P' ^'"^^^'"S like a small maiden-great strong
fellow as he was-and, putting his arm round Hetty stooped
down and gently kissed her lips ^' stooped

It was a prett)' scene in' the red fire-light : for there were
no candles; why should there be, when th^e fi e was so br S
and was reflected from all the pewter and the polished oak >
No one wanted to work on a Sunday evening.^ Even Hettv
felt something hke contentment in the midst of all this love^
Adam's attachment to her, Adam's caress, stirred nonassion
in her were no longer enough to satisfy h^r vanky but tl ev
srechLg:."'^^ ''' °"^^^^ '- -^••- ^heyprLis"ed'S

There was a great deal of discussion before Adam went
away, about the possibility of his finding a house Ihatw^uH

next to Will iMaskery's in the village, and that was too small

b^Jfor S'tir:'-, r'- "''-r^ ^'"^^^^^^ ''^^ ^'- best plan wTu "
be tor Seth and his mother to move, and leave Adam in the

old home, which might be enlarged after a whHe for her.
was plenty of space in the wood-vard and garden but Adam
objected to turning his mother out ' ^

. "Well, well," said Mr. Poyser at last, "we needna fiv
•verj-thing to-night. We must take time ti consider You
canna think o' getting married afore Easter. I'm no for lon^
^^^i::^' ''^'^ ''-'' '' ^^^-'^^- tomak/Thingf

"Phrtr *°f^n '''''''''' '.^''' -^^''- P°3-ser, in a hoarse whisper •

" W W^T'^'Y f""'^^' "'^^ ^^-k^°^' I reckon." ^

1 m a bit daunted though," said Mr. Poyser " when I

think as we may have notice to quit, and belike be fo ced to

take a farm twenty miles off." ^^ii-eu to

326 ADAM BEDE.

" Eh ! " said the old man, staring at the floor, and lifting
his hands up and down, while his arms rested on the elbows
of the chair, "it's a poor tale if I vswwi leave th' ould spot, an'
be buried in a strange parish. An' you'll happen ha' double
rates to pay," he added, looking up at his son.

" Well, thee mustna fret beforehand," said Martin the
younger. " Happen the captain 'uU come home and make
our peace wi' th' old squire. I build upo' that, for I know
the captain 'uU see folks righted if he can."

CHAPTER XXXV.

THE HIDDEN DREAD.

It was a busy time for Adam — the time between the
beginning of November and the beginning of February, and
he could see little of Hetty except on Sundays. But a happy
time, nevertheless ; for it was taking him nearer and nearer
to March, when they were to be married, and all the little
preparations for their new housekeeping marked the progress
toward the longed-for day. Two new rooms had been " run
up " to the old house, for his mother and Seth were to live
with them after all. Lisbeth had cried so piteously at the
thought of leaving Adam, that he had gone to Hetty and
asked her if, for 4:he love of him, she would put up with his
mother's ways, and consent to liv^e with her. To his great
delight Hetty said, " Yes, I'd as soon she lived with us as
not." Hetty's mind was oppressed at that moment with a
worse difficulty than poor Lisbeth's ways ; she could not care
about them. So Adam was consoled for the disappointment
he had felt when Seth had come back from his visit to Snow-
lield and said " it was no use — Dinah's heart wasna turned
toward marrying." For when he told his mother that Hetty
was willing they should all live together, and there was no
more need of them to think of parting, she said, in a more
contented tone than he had heard her speak in since it had
been settled that he was to be married, " Eh ! my lad, I'll be
as still as th' ould tabby, an' ne'er want to do aught but th'
offal work as she wonna like to do. An' then we needna part
th' platters an' things as ha' stood on the shelf together sin'
afore thee was born."

ADAM BEDE. . ^

There was only one cloud that now and then came across
Adam's sunshine: Hettyseemed unhappy sometimes Bu?
to all his anxious, tender questions, she replied with an as
surance that she was quite contented and wished nothing
different ; and the next time he saw her she was more livelf
than usual. It might be that she was a little overdone with
work and anxiety now, for soon after Christmas Mrs. Poyser

and hf''V"°'']f '/"^^'/'^i'^ ^'^^ ^^°"ght on inflamma^on
and this illness had confined her to her room all throudi Tan-

^'^i ^ u^. ^^"J ^° manage everything down stairs, and half
supply Molly's place too, while that good damsel v^a'ted on
hei mistress ; and she seemed to throw herself so entirely into
her new functions working with a grave steadiness whtch was
new in her, that Mr. Poyser often told Adam she was want-
mg to show him what a good housekeeper he would have •
but he " doubted the lass was o'erdoing it-she r^ut have a
bit o' rest when her aunt could come down staiJs^

fhis desirable event of Mrs. Poyser's coming down stairs
happened in the early part of February, when some mid
wead^er thawed the last patch of snow on the Bint^nT
On one of these days, soon after her aunt came down, Hetty
wM.h ^'■^^'^'^^^°" to buy some of the wedding things
which were wanting, and which Mrs. Poyser had scotded h??
or neglecting, observing that she supposed "it was because
enTugt" "°' '" ''' '"^"'^' '''' ''''^ ^^' ^-g'^t ''- ""

hoaJ W?^L7VT °;^l°ck when Hetty set off, and the slight
hoar frost that had whitened the hedges in the early momfn^
had disappeared as the sun mounted tl.e cloudless sky. Brrh?
February days have a stronger charm of hope about them
than any other days in the year. One likes to pause in th^
mild rays of the sun, and look over the gates at the patient
plough-horses turning at the end of the furrow, and think tha
he beautiful year is all before one. The birds seem to fee
just the same ; their notes are as clear as the clear air. There
a e no leaves on the trees and hedgerows, but how green aU
the grassy fields are! and the dark purplish brow? o the

Ko'rld^r'",' t ^-f ^ '^'-^"^'^^^ '' beautiful trWha"
vallevranH o . "'"'Jm,''^"' ^' °"" ^^'^^^^ °^ ^^des along the
valleys and over the hills ! I have often thought so whin in

IZll^eTT'^^-Z^'r'^' ^'^^' and woods have looked o
Is Mm K ^"1^''^ Loamshire-the rich land tilled with just

tZLZ7J'" T.^' ''^''''^ ^°^^" '^'' g^"tJ- slopes to
^tie green meadows-I have come on somethfng by the road-

328 ADAM BEDE.

side which has reminded me that I am not in Loamshire : an
image of a great agony — the agony of the Cross, It has
stood, perhaps, by the clustering apple-blossoms, or in the
broad sunshine by the corn-tield, or at a turning by the wood
where a clear brook was gurgling below ; and surely, if there
came a traveller to this world who knew nothing of the story
of man's life upon it, this image of agony would seem to him
strangely out of place in the midst of this joyous nature. He
would not know that, hidden behind the apple-blossoms, or
among the golden corn, or under the shrouding boughs of the
wood, there might be a human heart beating heavily v.ith an-
guish— perhaps a young blooming girl, not knowing where to
turn for refuge from swift-advancing shauje ; understanding
no more of this life of ours than a foolish lost lamb wandering
farther and farther in the nightfall on the lonely heath, yet
tasting the bitterest of life's bitterness.

Such things are sometimes hidden among the sunny fields
and behind the blossoming orchards ; and the sound of the
gurgling brook, if you came close to one spot behind a small
bush, would be mingled for your ear with a despairing human
sob. No wonder man's religion has much sorrow in it ; no
wonder he needs a Suffering God.

Hetty, in her red cloak and warm bonnet, with her basket
in her hand, is turning toward a gate by the side of the Tred-
dleston road, but not that she may have a more lingering en-
joyment of the sunshine, and think with hope of the long un-
folding year. She hardly knows that the sun is shining ; and
for weeks now, when she has hoped at all, it has been for
something at which she herself trembles and shudders. She
only wants to be out of the high-road, that she may walk
slowly, and not care how her face looks, as she dwells on
wretched thoughts ; and through this gate she can get into a
field-path behind the wide, thick hedgerows. Her great dark
eyes wander blankly over the fields like the eyes of one who
is desolate, homeless, unloved, not the promised bride of a
brave, tender man. But there are no tears in them ; her tears
were all wept away in the weary night before she went to
sleep. At the next stile the pathway branches off ; there are
two roads before her — one along by the hedgerow, v.hich will
by and by lead her into the road again ; the other across the
fields, which will take her much farther out of the way into
the Scantlands. low-shrouded pastures, where she will see no-
body. She chooses this, and begins to walk a little faster, as
if she had suddenly thought of an object toward which it was

ADAM BEDE.

worth whiJe to hasten. Soon she is in the Scantlands, where
the grassy land slopes gradually downward, and she leaves
the level ground to follow the slope. Farther on there is a
clump of trees on the low ground, and she is making her way
toward It No, it is not a clump of trees, but a dark shrouded
pool, so full with the wintery rains that the under bou<^hs of
the elder bushes lie low beneath the water. She sits°down
on the grassy bank, against the stooping stem of the great oak
that hangs over the dark pool. She has thought of this pool
often in the nights of the month that has just gone by and
now at last she is come to see it. She clasps her hands
round her knees and leans forward, and looks earnestly at it
as if trying to guess what sort of bed it would make for her
young round limbs.

No, she has not courage to jump into that cold watery
bed, and if she had, they might find her— they mi<rht find
out why she had drowned herself. There is but one thing
left to her ; she must go away, go where thev can't find her
Alter the first on-coming of her great dread, some weeks
arter her betrothal to Adam, she had waited and waited, in the
blind vague hope that something would happen to set her free
from her terror ; but she could wait no longer. All the force
ot her nature had been concentrated on the one effort of con-
cealment, and she had shrunk with irresistible dread from
every course that could tend toward a betraval of her miser-
able secret. Whenever the thought of writing to Arthur had
occurred to her she had rejected it ; he could^do nothing for
her that would shelter her from discovery and scorn among
the relatives and neighbors who once more made all her
world, now her airy dream had vanished. Her imagination
no onger saw happiness with Arthur, for he could do nothing

vo^ iZ '^'^'^^ °' u^°'^^ ^^^' P^^^^- N°' something elsS
would happen-somethmg must happen-to set her free from

sf.'nrl S Kr^^'"''"^: '^^^^'^^'^^' ^=^°^^"^ so"ls there is con-
stantly this blind trust in some unshapen chance ; it is as hard

h/m ^^' f f.'^ ° ^^Y^^'^ ^^^^ ^ ^''^^t wretchedness will befall
tnem, as to believe that they will die.

x\^''\ u°'^ "^^essity was pressing hard upon her-now the
reTf in .h"' uv'T^^ ''^' 0!°'^ ^^ hand-she could no longer
herself I' ^hnd trust. She must run away ; she must hide
terrn J ^ ^'^ ^1° ^^"''''^'' ^y^^ ^°"'^ de^e^t her ; and then the
terror of wandering out into the world, of which she knew
no hmg made the possibility of going to Arthur a though*
which brought some comfort with it. She felt so helplls a

330

ADAM BEDE.

now, so unable to fashion the future for herself, that the pros-
pect of throwing herself on him had a relief in it which was
stronger than her pride. As she sat by the pool and shud-
dered at the dark cold v;ater, the hope that he would receivff
her tenderly — that he would care for her and think for her — •
was like a sense of lulling warmth, that made her for the
moment indifferent to everything else ; and she began now
to think of nothing but the scheme by which she could get
away.

She had had a letter from Dinah lately, full of kind words
about the coming marriage, which she had heard of from
Seth ; and when Hetty had read this letter aloud to her uncle,
he had said, " I wish Dinah 'ud come again now, for she'd be
a comfort to your aunt when you're gone. What do you think,
my wench, o' going to see her as soon as you can be spared,
and persuading her to come back wi' you ? You might
happen persuade her wi' telling her as her aunt wants her, for
all she writes o' not being able to come." Hetty had not
liked the thought of going to Snowfield, and felt no longing to
see Dinah, so she only said, " It's so far off, uncle." But now
she thought this proposed visit would serve as a pretext for
going away. She would tell her aunt when she got home again,
that she should like the change of going to Snowfield for a
week or ten days. And then, when she got to Stoniton, where
nobody knew her, she would ask for the coach that would take
her on the way to Windsor. Arthur was at Windsor, and she
would go to him.

As soon as Hetty had determined on this scheme, she rose
from the grassy bank of the pool, took up her basket, and
went on her way to Treddleston, for she must buy the wed-
ding things she had come out for, though she would never
want them. She must be careful not to raise any suspicion
that she was going to run away.

Mrs. Poyser was quite agreeably surprised that Hetty
wished to go and see Dinah, and try to bring her back to
stay over the wedding. The sooner she went the better, s-ince
the weather was pleasant now ; and Adam, when he came in
the evening, said, if Hetty could set off to-morrow, he would
make time to go with her to Treddleston, and see her safe
into the Stoniton coach.

" I wish I could go with you and take care of you, Hetty,"
he said, the next morning, leaning in at the coach door ;
" but you won't stay much beyond a week — the time '11 seem
long."

ADAM BEDE.

331

He was looking at her fondly, and his strong hand held
hers in its grasp. Hetty felt a sense of protection in his
presence — she was used to it now ; if she couid have had the
past undone, and known no other love than her quiet liking
for Adam ! The tears rose as she gave him the lasr look.

" God bless her for loving me," said Adam, as he went on
his way to work again, with Gyp at his heels.

But Hetty's tears were not for Adam — not for the anguish
that would come upon him when he found she was gone from
him forever. They were for the misery of her own lot, which
took her away from this brave tender man who offered up his
whole life to her, and threw her, a poor helpless suppliant, on
the man who would think it a misfortune that she was obliged
to cling to him.

At three o'clock that day, when Hetty was on the coach
that was to take her, they said, to Leicester — part of the long,
long way to Windsor — she felt dimly that she might be
travelling all this weary journey toward the beginning ot
new misery.

Yet Arthur was at Windsor ; he would surely not be angry
with her. If he did not mind about her as he used to do, he
had promised to be good to her.

CHAPTER XXXVI.

THE JOURNEY IN HOPE

A LONG, lonely journey, with sadness in the heaitjaway
from the familiar to the strange ; that is a hard and dreary
thing even to the rich, the strong, the instructed ; a hard thing,
even when we are called by duty, not urged by dread.

What was it then to Hetty ? With her poor narrow thoughts,
no longer melting into vague hopes, but pressed upon by the
chill of definite fear ; repeating again and again the same
small round of memories — shaping again and again the same
childish, doubtful images of what was to come — seeing nothing
in this wide world but the little history of her own pleasures
and pains ; with so little money in her pocket, and the way so
long and difficult. Unless she could afford always to go in
the coaches — and she felt sure she could not, for the journey

332

ADAM BEDE.

to Stoniton was more expensive than she had expected — it
was plain that she must trust to carriers' carts or slow wagons ;
and what a time it would be before she could get to the end
of her journey ! The burly old coachman from Oakburne,
seeing such a pretty young woman among the outside passen-
gers, had invited her to come and sit beside him ; and, feeling
that it became him as a man and a coachman to open the dia-
logue with a joke, he applied himself as soon as they were off
the stones to the elaboration of one suitable in all respects.
After many cuts with his whip and glances at Hetty out of the
corner of his eye, he lifted his lips above the edge of his wrap-
per, and said,

" He's pretty nigh six foot, I'll be bound, isna he, now ? "

" Who ? " said Hetty, rather startled.

" Why, the sweetheart as you've left behind, or else him
as you're goin' arter — which is it ? "

Hetty felt her face flushing and then turning pale. She
thought this coachman must know something about her. He
must know Adam, and might tell him where she was gone, for
it is difficult to country people to believe that those who make
a figure in their own parish are not known everywhere else,
and it was equally difficult to Hetty to understand that chance
words could happen to apply closely to her circumstances.
She was too frightened to speak.

" Hegh, hegh ? " said the coachman, seeing that his joke
was not so gratifying as he had expected, *' you munna take it
too ser'ous if he's behaved ill, get another. Such a pretty lass
as you can get a sweetheart any day."

Hetty's fear was allayed by and by, when she found that
the coachman made no farther allusion to her personal con-
cerns ; but it still had the effect of preventing her from asking
him what were the places on the road to Windsor. She told
him she was only going a little way out of Stoniton, and when
she got down at the inn where the coach stopped, she hastened
away with her basket to another part of the town. When she
had formed her plan of going to Windsor, she had not fore-
seen any difficulties except that of getting away ; and after she
had overcome this by proposing the visit to Dinah, her thoughts
tlew to the meeting with Arthur, and the question how he
would behave to her — not resting on any probable incidents
of the journey. She was too entirely ignorant of travelling to
imagine any of its details, and with all her store of money —
her three guineas — in her pocket, she thought herself amply
provided. It was not until she found how much it cost her to

ADAM BEDE. , ,-

get to Stoniton that she began to be alarmed about the jour-
ney, and then, for the first time, she felt her ignorance as to
the places that must be passed on htr way. Oppressed with
this new alarm, she walked along the grim Stoniton streets,
and at last '^urned into a shabby little inn, where she hoped
to get a che p lodging for the night. Here she asked the
landlord if he could tell her what places she must go to, to get
to Windsor.

" Well, I can't rightly say. Windsor must be pretty nigh
London, for it's where the king lives," was the answer. ''Any-
how, ^ you'd best go 't Ashby next— that's south'ard. But
there's as many places from here to London as there's houses
in Stoniton, by what I can make out. I've never been no
traveller myself. But how comes a lone young woman, like
you, to be thinking o' taking such a journey as that } "

_ "I'm going to my brother— he's a soldier at Windsor,"
said Hetty, frghtened at the landlord's questioning look. "I
can't afford to go by the coach ; do you think there's a cart
goes towards Ashby in the morning ? "

" Yes, there may be carts, if anybody knowed where they
started from ; but you might run over the town before you
found out. You'd best set off and walk, and trust to summat
overtaking you."

Everyiword sank like lead on Hetty's spirits ; she saw the
journey stretch bit by bit before her now ; even to get to
Ashby seemed a hard thing: it might take the day, for what
she knew, and that was- nothing to the rest of the journey.
But It must be done— she must get to Arthur: oh, how she
vearned to be again with somebody who would care for her!
She who had never got up in the morning without the cer-
tainty of seeing familiar faces, people on "whom she had an
acknowledged claim ; whose farthest journev had been to
Rosseter on the pillion with her uncle ; whose thoughts had
alwavs been taking holiday in dreams of pleasure, because all
the busmess of her life was managed for her : this kitten-like
Hetty, who till a few months ago had never felt any other
grief than that of envying Mary Burge a new ribbon, or being
girded at by her aunt for neglecting Totty, must now make
lier toilsome way in loneliness, her peaceful home left behind
forever, and nothing but a tremulous hope of distant refuge
before her. Now for the first time, as she lay down to-nio-ht
in the strange hard bed, she felt that her home had been a
ftappy one, that her uncle had been very good to her, that
ner quiet lot at Hayslope among the things and people she

334

ADAM BEDE,

knew, with her little pride in her one best go.wn and bonnet,
and nothing to hide from any one, was what she would like
to wake up to as a reality, and find all the feverish life she
had known besides was a short nightmare. She thought of
all she had left behind with yearning regret for her own sake :
her own misery filled her heart ; there was no room in it for
other people's sorrow. And yet, before the cruel letter,
Arthur had been so tender and loving : the memory of that
had still a charm for her, though it was no more than a sooth-
ing draught that just made pain bearable. For Hetty could
conceive no other existence for herself in future than a hidden
one, and a hidden life, even with love, would have had no de-
lights for her; still less a life mingled with shame. She knew
no romances, and had only a feeble share in the feelings which
are the source of romance, so that well-read ladies may find
it difficult to understand her state of mind. She was too ig-
norant of everything beyond the simple notions and habits in
which she had been brought up, to have any more definite
idea of her probable future than that Arthur would take care
of her somehow, and shelter her from anger and scorn. He
would not marry her and make her a lady ; and apart from
that she could think of nothing he could give towards which
she looked with longing and ambition.

The next morning she rose early, and, taking only some
milk and bread for her breakfast, set out to walk on the road
towards Ashby, under a leaden-colored sky, with a narrowing
streak of yellow, like a departed hope, on the edge of the
horizon. Now, in her faintness of heart at the length and
difficulty of her journey, she was most of all afraid of spend-
ing her money, and becoming so destitute that she would have
to ask people's charity; for Hetty had the pride not only of
a proud nature but of a proud class — the class that pays the
most 'poor-rates, and most shudders at the idea of profiting
by a poor-rate. It had not yet occurred to her that she might
get money for her locket and earrings which she carried with
her, and she applied all her small arithmetic knowledge of
prices to calculating how many meals and how many rides
were contained in her two guineas, and the odd shillings,
which had a melancholy look, as if they were the pale ashes
of the bright-flaming coin.

For the first few miles out of Stoniton she walked on
bravely, always fixing on some tree or gate or projecting bush
at the most distant visible point in the road as a goal, and
feeling a faint ioy when she had reached it. But when she

ADAM BEDS. ,,e

came to the fourth milestone, the first she had happened to
notice among the long grass by the roadside, and read that
she was still only four miles beyond Stoniton, her courage
sank. She had come only this little way, and yet felt tired,
and almost hungry again in the keen morning air ; for, though
Hetty was accustomed to much movement and exertion in-
doors, she was not used to long walks, which produced quite
a dififerent sort of fatigue from that of household activity. As
she was looking at the milestone she felt some drops falling
on her face — it was beginning to rain. Here was a new trouble
which had not entered into her sad thoughts before ; and quite
weighed down by this addition to her burden, she sat down
on the step of a stile and began to sob hysterically. The be-
ginning of hardship is like the first taste of bitter food — it
seems for a moment unbearable: yet" if there is nothing else
to satisfy our hunger, we take another bite and go on. When
Hetty recovered from her burst of weeping, she rallied her
fainting courage ; it was raining, and she must try to get on
to a village where she might find rest and shelter. Presently,
as she walked on wearily she heard the rumbling of heavy
wheels behind her ; a covered wagon was coming, creeping
slowly along with a slouching driver cracking his whip beside
the horses. She waited for it, thinking that, if the wagoner
were not a very sour-looking man, she would ask him to take
her up. As the wagon approached her, the driver had fallen
behind, but there was something in front of the big vehicle
which encouraged her. At any previous moment in her life
she would not have noticed it ; but now, the new susceptibility
that suffering had awakened in her caused this object to im-
press her strongly. It was only a small white-and-liver colored
spaniel which sat on the front ledge of the wagon, with large
timid eyes, and an incessant trembling in the body, such as
you may have seen in some of these small creatures. Hetty
cared little for animals, as you know, but at this moment she
felt as if the helpless timid'creature had some fellowship with
her, and without being quite aware of the reason, she was less
doubtful about speaking to the driver, who now came forward
— a large ruddy man, with a sack over his shoulders by way
of scarf or mantle.

" Could you take me up in your wagon, if you're going tow-
ard Ashby ? " said Hetty. " I'll pay you for it."

"Aw," said the big fellow, with that slowly dawning smile
which belongs to heavy faces, " I can take y' up fawst enough
wi out bein' paid for't, if you dooant mind lyin' a bit closish

336 ADAM BEDE.

a-top o' the wool-packs, Where do you coom from? and
what do you want at Ashby ? "

" I come from Stoniton. I'm going along way — to Wind-
sor."

" What, arter some service, or what ? "
" Going to my brother — he's a soldier there."
" Well, I'm going no furder nor Leicester — and fur enough
too — but I'll take you, if you dooant mind being a bit long on
the road. Th' bosses wooant feel your weight no more nor
they feel the little doog there, as I puck up on the road a fort
ni't agoo. He war lost, I b'lieve, an's been all of a tremble
iver sin'. Come, gi' us your basket, an' come behind and let
me put y' in."

To lie on the wool-packs, with a cranny left between the
curtains of the awning to let in the air, was luxury to Hetty
now, and she half slept away the hours till the driver came
to ask her if she wanted to get down and have '" some vic-
tual ;" he himself was going to eat dinner at this "public."
Late at night they reached Leicester, and so this second
day of Hetty's journey was past. She had spent no money
except what she had paid for her food, but she felt that this
slow journeying would be intolerable for her another day, and
in the morning she found her way to a coach-ofhce to ask about
the road to Windsor, and see if it would cost her too much to
go part of the distance by coach again. Yes ! the distance
was too great — the coaches were too dear — she must give them
up ; but the elderly clerk at the ofhce, touched by her pretty,
anxious face, wrote down for her the names of the chief places
she must pass through. This was the only comfort she got in
Leicester, for the men stared at her as she went along the
street, and for the first time in her life Hetty wished no one
would look at her. She set out walking again ; but this day
she was fortunate, for she was soon overtaken by a carrier's
cart which carried her to Hinckley, and by the help of a return
chaise, with a drunken postillion — who frightened her by
driving like Jehu the sun of Nimshi, and shouting hilarious
remarks at her, twisting himself backward on his saddle — she
was before night in the heart of woodv Warwickshire ; but
still almost a hundred miles from Windsor, they told her.
Oh, what a large world it was. and what hard work for her to
find her way in it ! She went bv mistake to Stratford-on-
Avon, finding Stratford set down in her list of places, and
then she was told she had come a long way out of the right
road. It was not till the fifth day that she got to Stony Strat-

ADAM BEDE.

337

ford. That seems but a slight journey as you look at the
map, or remember your own pleasant travels to and from
the meadowy banks of the Avon. But how wearily long it
was to Hetty ! It seems to her as if this country of flat
fields and hedgerows, and dotted houses, and villages, and
market-towns — all so much alike to her indifferent eyes — must
have no end, and she must go on wandering among them for-
ever, waiting tired at toll-gates for some cart to come, and
then finding the cart went only a little way — a very little way
— to the miller's, a mile off perhaps; and she hated going into
the public-houses, where she must go to get food and ask
questions, because there were always men lounging there, who
stared at her and joked her rudely. Her body was very
wear}' too with these days of new fatigue and anxiety ; they
had made her look more pal*^ and worn than all the tmie of
hidden dread she had gone through at home. When at last she
reached Stony Stratford, her impatience and weariness haQ>
become too strong for her economical caution ; she deter-
mined to take the coach for the rest. of the way, though it
should cost her all her remaining money. She would need
nothing at Windsor but to find Arthur. When she had paid
the fare for the last coach, she had only a shilling ; and as
she got down at the sign of the Green Man in Windsor, at
twelve o'clock in the middle of the day, hungry and faint, the
coachman came up, and begged her to " remember him."
She put her hand in her pocket and took out the shilling, but the
tears came with the sense of exhaustion and the thought that
she was giving away her last means of getting food, which she
reallv required before she could go in search of Arthur. As
she held out the shilling, she lifted up her dark, tear-filled
eyes to the coachman's face, and said, " Can you give me
back sixpence ? "

"No, no," he said, gruffly, " never mind ; put the shilling
up again."

the landlord of the Green Man had stood near enough to
witness this scene, and he was a man whose abundant feeding
served to keep his good-nature, as well as his person, in high
condition. And that lovely, tearful face of Hetty's would have
found out the sensitive fibre in most men.

" Come, 3'oung woman, come in," he said, "and have a
drop o' something ; you're prettv well knocked up ; I can see
that."

He took her into the bar and said to his wife, " Here,
missis, take this young woman into the parlor ; she's a little

338 ADAM BEDE.

overcome " — for Hetty's tears were falling fast. They were
merely hysterical tears ; she thought she had no reason for
weeping now, and was vexed that she was too weak and tired
to help it. She was at Windsor at last, not far from Arthur.

She looked with eager, hungry eyes at the bread, and
meat, and beer that the landlady brought her, and for some
minutes she forgot everything else in the delicious sensations
of satisfying hunger and recovering from exhaustion. The
landlady sat opposite to her as she ate, and looked at her
earnestly. No wonder ; Hetty had thrown off her bonnet, and
her curls had fallen down ; her face was all the more touching
in its youth and beauty because of its weary look, and the good
woman's eyes presently wandered to her figure, which in her
hurried dressing on her journey she had taken no pains to
conceal ; moreover, the stranger's eye detects what the familiar
-'insuspecting eye leaves unnoticed.

tr " Why, you'Ve not very fit for travelling," she said, glancing
while she spoke at Hetty's ringless hand, " Have you come
far ? "

" Yes," said Hetty, roused by this question to exert more
self-command, and feeling the better for the food she had
taken. " I've come a good long way, and it's very tiring, but
I'm better now. Could you tell me which way to go to this
place? " Here Hetty took from her pocket a bit of paper ; it
was the end of Arthur's letter on which he had written his
address.

While she was speaking the landlord had come in, and had
begun to look at her earnestly as his wife had done. He took
up the piece of paper which Hetty handed across the table,
and read the address.

" Why, what do you want at this house t " he said. It is
in the nature of innkeepers, and all men who have no pressing
business of their own, to ask as many questions as possible
before giving any information.

'• I want to see a gentleman as is there," said Hetty.

" But there's no gentleman there," returned the landlord.
"It's shut up — been shut up this fortnight. What gentleman
is it you want ? Perhaps I can let you know where to find
him,"

" It's Captain Donnithorne," said Hetty, tremulously, her
heart beginning to beat painfully at this disappointment of
her hope that she should find Arthur at once.

" Captain Donnithorne ! Stop a bit." said the landlord,
slowly. " Was he in the Loamshire militia t A tall young

DAM BEDE.

339

officer, with a fairish skin and reddish whiskers, and had a
servant by the name o' Pym ? "

" Oh yes," said Hetty ; " you know him — where is he ? "

" A fine sight o' miles away from here ; the Loamshire
militia's gone to Ireland ; it's been gone this fortnight."

"Look there! she's fainting," said the landlady, hastening
to support Hett}', who had lost her miserable consciousness
and looked like a beautiful corpse. They carried her to the
sofa and loosened her dress.

" Here's a bad business, I suspect," said the landlord, as
he brought in some water.

" Ah ! it's plain enough what sort of business it is," said
the wife. " She's not a common flaunting dratchell, I can see
that. She looks like a respectable country girl, and she comes
from a good way off, to judge by her tongue. She talks some-
thing like that ostler we had that come from the north ; he
was as honest a fellow as we ever had about the house ; they're
all honest folks in the north."

" I never saw a prettier young woman in my life," sa'd the
husband. " She's like a pictur in a shop-winder. It goes to
one's 'eart to look at her."

" It 'ud have been a good deal better for her if she'd been
uglier and had more conduct," said the landlady, who, on any
charitable construction, must have been supposed to have
more "conduct" than beauty. " But she's coming to again.
Fetch a drop more water."

CHAPTER XXXVII.

THE JOURNEY IN DESPAIR.

Hetty was too ill through the rest of that day for any
^questions to be addressed to her — too ill even to think with
any distinctness of the evils that were to come. She only felt
that all her hope was crushed, and tlvat, instead of bavins;-
found a refuge, she had only reached the borders of a new
wilderness where no goal lay before her. The sensations of
bodily sickness, in a comfortable bed, and with the tendance
of the good-natured landlady, made a sort of respite for her ;
such a respite as there is in the faint weariness which obliges

340

ADAM BEDE.

a man to throw nimself on the sand instead of toiling onward

under the scorching sun.

But when sleep and rest had brought back the strength
neccessary for the keenness of mental suffering — when she
lay the next morning looking at the growing light, which was
like a cruel taskmaster returning to urge from her a fresh
round of hated hopeless labor — she began to think what
course she must take, to remember that all her money was
gone, to look at the prospect of farther wandering among
strangers with the new clearness shed on it by the experience
of her journey to Windsor. But which way could she turn ?
It was impossible for her to enter into any service, even if
she could obtain it ; there was nothing but immediate beg-
gary before her. She thought of a young woman who had
been found against the church wall at Hayslope one Sunday,
nearly dead with cold and hunger — a tiny infant in her arms :
the woman was rescued and taken to the parish. "The
parish ! " You can, perhaps, hardly understand the effect of
that word on a mind like Hetty's, brought up among people
who were somewhat hard in their feelings even toward
poverty, who lived among the fields, and had little pity for
want and rags as a hard, inevitable fate, such as they some-
times seem in cities, but held them a mark of idleness and
vice ; and it was idleness and vice that brought burdens on
the parish. To Hetty the " parish " was next to the prison
in obloquy ; and to ask anything of strangers — to beg — lay
in the same far-off hideous region of intolerable shame, that
Hetty had all her life thought it impossible she could ever
come near. But now the remembrance of that wretched
woman, whom she had seen herself, on her way from church,
being carried into Joshua Rann's, came back upon her with
the new terrible sense that there was very little now to divide
her from the same lot. And the dread of bodily hardship
mingled with the dread of shame, for Hetty had the luxurious
nature of a round, soft-coated pet animal.

How she yearned to be back in her safe home again,
cherished and cared for as she had always been ! Her aunt's
scolding about trifles would have been music to her ears now ;
she longed for it ; she used to hear it in a time when she had
only trifles to hide. Could she be the same Hetty that used
to make up the butter in the dairy with the Gueldre roses
peeping u. £1 t'^e window — she, a runaway whom her friends
would not open their doors to again, lying in this strange bed,
with the knowledge that she had no money to pay for what

ADAM BEDE.

34'

she received, and must offer those strangers some of the
clothes in her basket ? It was then she thought of her locket
and earrings ; and, seeing her pocket lie near, she reached it,
and spread the contents on the bed before her. There were
the locket and earrings in the little velvet-lined boxes, and
with them there was a beautiful silver thimble which Adam
had bought her, the words " Remember me " making the
ornament of the border ; a steel purse, with her one shilling
in it, and a small red-leather case fastening with a strap.
Those beautiful little earrings, with their delicate pearls and
garnet, that she had tried in her ears with such longing in the
bright sunshine on the 30th of July ! She had no longing to
put them in her ears now ; her head, with its dark rings of
hair, lay back languidly on the pillow, and the sadness that
rested about her brow and eyes was something too hard for
regretful memory. Yet she put her hands up to her ears : it
was because there were some thin gold rings in them, which
were also worth a little money. Yes, she could surely get
some money for her ornaments : those Arthur had given her
must have cost a great deal of money. The landlord and
landlady had been good to her — perhaps they would help her
to get the money for these things.

But this money would not keep her long ; what should she
do when it was gone ? Where should she go } The horri-
ble thought of want and beggary drove her once to think she
would go back to her uncle and aunt, and ask them to forgive
her and have pity on her. But she shrank from that idea
again, as she might have shrunk from scorching metal ; she
could never endure that shame before her uncle and aunt, be-
fore ]\Iary Burge, and the servants at the Chase, and the peo-
ple at Broxton, and everybody who knew her. They should
never know what had happened to her. What could she do ?
she would go away from Windsor — travel again as she had
done the last week, and get among the flat green fields with
the high hedges round them, where nobody would see her or
know her; and there perhaps, when there was nothing else
she could do, she should get courage to drown herself in some
pond like that in the Scantlands. Yes, she would get away
from Windsor as soon as possible ; she didn't like these peo-
ple at the inn to know about her, to know that she had come
to look for Captain Donnithorne ; she must think of some
reason to tell them why she had asked for him.

With this thought she began to put the things back into
her pocket, meaning to get up and dress before the landlady

342

ADAM BEDE

came to her. She had her hand on the red-leather case, when
it occurred to her that there might be something in this case
which she had forgotten — something worth seUing \ for with-
out knowing what she should do with her life, she craved the
means of living as long as possible • and when we desire
eagerly to find something, we are apt to search in hopeless
places. No, there was nothing but common needles and pins,
and dried tulip-petals between the paper leaves where she
had written down her little money accounts. But on one of
these leaves there was a name, which, often as she had seen
it before, now flashed on Hetty's mind like a newly-discovered
message. The name was — Dinah Morris, Snotvjield. There
was a text above it, written, as well as the name, by Dinah's
own hand with the little pencil, one evening that they were
sitting together and Hetty happened to have the red case ly-
ing open before her. Hetty did not read the text now ; she
was only arrested by the name. Now, for the first time, she
remembered without indifference the affectionate kindness
Dinah had shown her, and those words of Dinah in the bed-
chamber— that Hetty must think of her as a friend in trouble.
Suppose she were to go to Dinah, and ask her to help her ?
Dinah did not think about things as other people did : she
was a mystery to Hetty, but Hetty knew she was always kind.
She couldn't imagine Dinah's face turning away from her in
dark reproof or scorn, Dinah's voice willingly speaking ill of
her, or rejoicing in her misery as a punishment. Dinah did
not seem to belong to that world of Hetty's, whose glance
she dreaded like scorching fire. But even to her Hetty
shrank from beseeching and confession ; she could not pre-
vail on herself to say, " I will go to Dinah ;" she only thought
of that as a possible alternative, if she had not courage for
death.

The good landlady was amazed when she saw Hetty come
down stairs soon after herself, neatly dressed and looking res-
olutely self-possessed. Hetty told her she was quite well
this morning; she had only been very tired and overcome
with her jourrney, for she had come a long way to ask about
her brother, who had run away, and they thought he was gone
for a soldier, and Captain Donnithorne might know, for he had
been very kind to her brother once. It was a lame story, and
the landlady looked doubtfully at Hetty as she told it ; but
there was a resolute air of self-reliance about her this morn-
ing, so different from the helpless prostration of yesterday,
that the landlady hardly knew how to make a remark that

ADAM BEDE.

343

might seem like prying into other people's affairs. She only
invited her to sit down to breakfast with them, and, in the
course of it, Hetty brought out her earrings and locket, and
asked the landlord if he could help her to get money for them :
her journey, she said, had cost her much more than she ex-
pected, and now she had no money to get back to her friends
which she wanted to do at once.

It was not the first time the landlady had seen the orna-
ments, for she had examined the contents of Hetty's pocket
yesterday, and she and her husband had discussed the fact
of a country girl having these beautiful things, with a stronger
conviction than ever that Hetty had been miserably deluded
by the fine young officer.

" Well," said the landlord, when Hetty had spread the
precious trifles before him, "we might take 'em to the jeweler's
shop, for there's one not far off ; but Lord bless you, they
wouldn't give you a quarter o' what the things are worth.
And you wouldn't like to part with 'em ?" he added, looking
at her inquiringly.

" Oh, I don't mind," said Hetty, hastily, " so as I can get
money to go back."

" And they might think the things were stolen, as you
wanted to sell 'em," he went on ; " for it isn't usual for a
young woman like you to have fine jew'lery like that."

The blood rushed to Hetty's face with anger. " I belong
to respectable folks," she said; "I'm not a thief."

" No, that you aren't, I'll be bound," said the landlady ;
"and you'd no call to say that," looking indignantly at her
husband. " The things were gev to her ; that's plain enough
to be seen."

" I didn't mean as I thought so," said the husband apolo-
getically, "but I said it was what the jeweler might think, and
so he wouldn't be offering much money for 'em."

"Well," said the wife, "suppose you were to advance
some money on the things yourself, and then if she liked to
redeem 'em when she got home, she could, but if we heard
nothing from her after two months, we might dp as we liked
with 'em."

I will not say that in this accommodating proposition the
landlady had no regard whatever to the possible reward of her
good-nature in the ultimate possession of the locket and ear-
rings ; indeed, the effect they would have in that case on the
mind of the grocer's wife had presented itself with remarkable
vividness to her rapid imagination. The landlord took up

344 ADAM REDE.

the ornaments and pushed out his lips in a meditative manner.
He wished Hetty well, doubtless ; but pray, how many of
your well-wishers would decline to make a little gain out of
you ? Your landlady is sincerely affected at parting with
you, respects you highly, and will really rejoice if any one
else is generous to you ; but at the same time she hands you a
bill by which she gains as high a percentage as possible.

" How much money do you want to get home with, young
woman ? " said the well-wisher, at length.

" Three guineas," answered Hetty, fixing on the sum she
set out with, for want of any other standard, and afraid of
asking too much.

" Well, I've no objections to advance you three guineas,"
said the landlord ; " and if you like to send it me back and
get the jewelry again, you can, you know ; the Green Man
isn't going to run away."

"Oh yes, I'll be very glad if you'll give me that," said
Hetty, relieved at the thought that she would not have to go
to the jeweler's, and be stared at and questioned.

" But if you want the things again, you'll write before
long," said the landlady ; " because when two months are up
we shall make up our minds as you don't want 'em."

" Yes," said Hetty, indifferently.

The husband and wife were equally content with this ar-
rangement. The husband thought, if the ornaments were not
redeemed, he could make a good thing of it by taking them to
London and selling them ; the wife thought she would coax
the good man into letting her keep them. And they were ac-
commodating Hetty, poor thing ! a pretty, respectable look-
ing young woman, apparently in a sad case. They declined
to take anything for her food and bed ; she was quite wel-
come. And at eleven o'clock Hetty said " Good-by " to
them, with the same quiet, resolute air she had worn all the
morning, mounting the coach that was to take her twenty
miles back along the way she had come.

There is a strength of self-possession which is the sign that
the last hope has departed. Despair no more leans on others
than perfect contentment, and in despair pride ceases to be
counteracted by the sense of dependence.

Hetty felt that no one could deliver her from the evils that
would make life hateful to her ; and no one, she said to her-
self, should ever know her misery and humiliation. No; she
would not confess even- to Dinah ; she would wander out of
sight, and drown herself where her body would never be
found, and no one should know what had become of her.

ADAM BEDE. ,.-

345

When she got ofif this coach, she began to walk again,
and take cheap rides in carts, and get cheap meals, going on
and on without distinct purpose, yet strangely, by some fas-
cination, taking the way she had come, though she was deter-
mined not to go back to her own country. PeAaps it was
because she had feed her mind on the grassy Warwickshire
fields, with the bushy tiee-studded hedgerows that made a
hiding-place even in this leafless season. She went more
slowly than she came, often getting over the stiles and sitting
for hours under tlie hedgerows, looking before her with blank,
beautiful eyes : fancying herself at the edge of a hidden pool,
low down, like that in the Scantlands ; wondering if it were
very painful to be drowned, and if there would be anything
worse after death 1 han what she dreaded in life. Religious
doctrines had taken no hold on Hetty's mind ; she was one
of those numerous people who have had godfathers and god-
mothers, learned their catechism, been confirmed, and gone
to church every Sunday, and yet for any practical result for
strength in life, or trust in death, have never appropriated a
single Christian idea or Christian feeling. You would mis-
understand hei thoughts during these wretched days, if you
imagined that ihey were influenced either by religious fears
or religious hopes.

She chose to go to Stratford on-Avon again, where she
had gone before by mistake ; for slie remembered some grassy
fields on her former way toward it — fields among which she
thought she might find just the soit of pool she had in her
mind. Yet she took care of her -noney still ; she carried her
basket; death still seemed a long way off, and life was so
strong in her ! She craved food and rest — she hastened tow-
ard them at the veiy moment she was picturing to herself
the bank from which she would leap to'- rd death. It was
already five days since she had Id t Windsor, for she had wan-
dered about, always avoiding speech or questioning looks and
recovering her air of proud self dependence whenever she
was under observation, choosing her decent lodging at nio-ht
and dressing herself neatly in the morning, and setttng off on
her way steadily, or remaining under shelter if it rained, as if
she had a happy life to cherish.

And yet, even in her most self conscious moments, the face
was sadly differer.t f-om that which had smiled at itself in the
old speckled glass, or smi'ed at ethers when they glanced at it
admiringly. A hard ai.d even fierce look had'come in the
eyes, though their lashes v/ere . ,s long as ever, and they had

346 ADAM BEDS.

all their dark brightness. And the cheek was never dimpled
with smiles now. It was the same rounded, pouting, childish
prettiness, but with all love and belief in love departed from
it — the sadder for its beauty, like that wondrous Medusa-
face, with the passionate, passionless lips.

At last she was among the fields she had been dreaming
of, on a long, narrow pathway leading toward a wood. If
there should be a pool in that wood ! It would be better hid-
den than one in the fields. No, it was not a wood, only a
wild brake, where there had once been gravel-pits, leaving
mounds and hollows studded with brushwood and small trees.
She roamed up and down, thinking there was perhaps a pool
in every hollow before she came to it, till her limbs were
weary, and she sat down to rest. The afternoon was far ad-
vanced, and the leaden sky was darkening, as if the sun were
setting behind it. After a little while Hetty started up again,
feeling that darkness would soon come on ; and she must put
off finding the pool till to-morrow, and make her way to some
shelter for the night. She had quite lost her way in the
fields, and might as well go in one direction as another, for
aught she knew. She walked through field after field, and no
village, no house was in sight ; but t/iere, at the corner of this
pasture, there was a break in the hedges ; the land seemed to
dip down a little, and two trees leaned toward each other
across the opening. Hetty's heart gave a great beat as she
thought there must be a pool there. She walked toward it
heavily over the tufted grass, with pale lips and a sense of
trembling ; it was as if the thing had come in spite of herself,
instead of being the object of her search.

There it was, black under the darkening sky ; no motion,
no sound near. She set down her basket, and then sank
down herself on the grass, trembling. The pool had its win-
try depth now ; by the time it got shallow, as she remem-
bered the pools did at Hayslope, in the summer, ao one could
find out that it was her body. But then there was her basket
— she must hide that too ; she must throw it into the water —
make it heavy with stones first, and then throw it in. She
got up to look about for stones, and soon brought five or six,
which she laid down beside her basket, and then sat down
again. There was no need to hurry — there was all the night
to drown herself in.

She sat leaning her elbow on the basket. She was weary,
hungry. There were some buns in her basket — three, which
she had supplied herself with at the place where she ate her

ADAM BEDE.

347

dinner. She took them out now, and ate them eagerly, and
then sat still again, looking at the pool. The soothed sen-
sation that came over her from the satisfaction of her hunger,
and this fixed, dreamy attitude, brought on drowsiness, and
presently her head sank down on her knees. She was fast
asleep.

When she awoke it was deep night, and she felt chill. She
was frightened at this darkness — frightened at the long night
before her. If she could but throw herself into the water !
No, not yet. She began to walk about that she might get
warm again, as if she would have more resolution then. Oh,
how long the time was in that darkness ! The bright hearth,
and the warmth and the voices of home — the secure uprising
and lying down — the familiar fields, the familiar people, the
Sundays and holidays, with their simple joys of dress and
feasting — all the sweets of her young life rushed before her
now, and she seemed to be stretching her arms towards them
across a great gulf. She set her teeth when she thought of
Arthur ; she cursed him, without knowing what her cursing
would do ; she wished he too might know desolation, and
cold, and a life of shame that he dared not end by death.

The horror of this cold, and darkness, and solitude — out
of all human reach — became greater every long minute ; it
was almost as if she were dead already, and knew that she
was dead, and longed to get back to life again. But no ; she
was alive still ; she had not taken the dreadful leap. She
felt a strange contradictory wretchedness and exultation ;
wretchedness, that she did not dare to face death ; exultation,
that she was still in life — that she might yet know light and
warmth again. She walked backward and forward to warm
herself, beginning to discern something of the objects around
her, as her eyes became accustomed to the night ; the darker
line of the hedge, the rapid motion of some living creature —
perhaps a iield-mouse — rushing across the grass. She no
longer felt as if the darkness hedged her in ; she thought she
could walk back across the field, and get over the stile ; and
then, in the very next field, she thought she remembered there
was a hovel of furze near a sheepfold. If she could get into
that hovel, she would be warmer; she could pass the night
there, for that was what Alick did at Hayslope in lambing-
time. The thought of this hovel brought the energy of a new
hope ; she took up her basket and walked across the field,
but it was some time before she got in the right direction for
the stile. The exercise, and the occupation of finding tha

348 ADAM BRDB.

stile, were a stimulus to her, however, and lightened the hor-
ror of the darkness and solitude. There were sheep in the
next field, and she started a group as she set down her bas-
ket and got over the stile ; and the sound of their movement
comforted her, for it assured her that her impression was
right ; this was the field where she had seen the hovel, for it
was the field where the sheep were. Right on along the path,
and she would get to it. She reached the opposite gate, and
felt her way along its rails, and the rails of the sheepfold, till
her hands encountered the pricking of the gorsy wall. De-
licious sensation ! She had found the shelter ; she groped her
way, touching the prickly gorse, to the door, and pushed it
open. It was an ill-smelling, close place, but warm, and there
was straw on the ground. Hetty sank down on the straw
with a sense of escape. Tears came — she had never shed
tears before since she left Windsor — tears and sobs of hyster-
ical joy that she had still hold of life, that she was still on
the familiar earth, with the sheep near her. The very con-
sciousness of her own limbs was a delight to her ; she turned
up her sleeves, and kissed her arms with the passionate love
of life. Soon warmth and weariness lulled her in the midst of
her sobs, and she fell continually into dozing, fancying herself
at the brink of the pool again — fancying that she had jumped
into the water, and then awaking with a start, and wondering
where she was. But at last deep dreamless sleep came ; her
head, guarded by her bonnet, found a pillow against the gorsy
walls, and the poor soul, driven to and fro between two equal
terrors, found the one relief that was possible to it — the relief
of unconsciousness.

Alas ! that relief seems to end the moment it has begun.
It seemed to Hetty as if those dozing dreams had only passed
into another dream — that she was in the hovel, and her aunt
was standing over her with a candle in her hand. She trem-
bled under her aunt's glance, and opened her eyes. There
was no candle, but there was a light in the hovel — the light
of early morning through the open door. And there was a face
looking down on her ; but it was an unknown face, belong-
ing to an elderly man in a smock-frock.

" Why, what do you do here, young woman ? " the m-an
said roughly.

Hetty trembled still worse under this real fear and shame
than she had done in her momentary dream under her aunt's
glance. She felt that she was like a beggar already — found
sleeping in that place. But in spite of her trembling, she was

ADAM BEDE. ^ ,^

349

SO eager to account to the man for her presence here that she
found words at once. '

"I lost my way," she said. '^ I'm travelling— north 'ard
and I got away from the road into the fields, and was overl
taken by the dark. Will you tell me the way to the nearest
Village ?

She got up as she was speaking, and put her hands to her
bonnet to adjust it, and then laid hold of her basket

The man looked at her with a slow bovine gaze, without
givnig her any answer, for some seconds^ Then he turned
away and walked toward the door of the hovel, but it was not
til he got there that he stood still, and, turning his shoulder
naif round toward her, said,

" Aw, I can show you the way to Norton, if you like. But
what do you do gettin' out o' the highroad ? " he added, with
a tone of gruff reproof. " YuU be gettin' into mischief, if
you dooant mind.

rn.H ^f '" m^K ^'"^' '7 ^'°"'t d° '' ^g^i"- I'» keep in the

u'„rJ°", ^^ ^^ g°°^ ^s show me how to get to it "
Why dooant you keep where there's finger-poasses an'
folks to ax the way on .? " the man said, still more gruffly
Anybody ud think you was a wild woman, an' look at yer "

Hetty was frightened at this gruff old man, and still more
at this last suggestion that she looked like a wild woman
As she followed him out of the hovel she thought she would
give him a sixpence for telling her the way, and then he would
not suppose she was wild. As he stopped to point out the
road to her, she put her hand in her pocket to get the six-
pence ready, and when he was turning away, without saying
good-morning, she held it out to him and said, " Thank you
will you please to take something for your trouble .? "

He^looked slowly at the sixpence, and then said, "I want
none o your money. You'd better take care on't, else you'll
get It stool from yer, if you go trapesin' about the fields like
a mad woman a-that'n."

The man left her without farther speech, and Hetty held
on her way. Another day had risen, and she must wander
on It was no use to think of drowning herself— she could
not do It, at least while she had money left to buy food and
strength to journey on. But the incident on her wakini this
morning heightened her dread of that time when her money
would be all gone ■ she would have to sell her basket and clothes
then, and she would really look like a beggar or a wild woman,
as the man had said. The passionate joy in life she had felt

35*

ADAM BEDE,

in the night, after escaping from the brink of the black, cold
death in the pool, was gone now. Life now, by the morning
light, with the impression of that man's hard wondering look
at her, was as full of dread as death : it was worse ; it was
a dread to which she felt chained, from which she shrank and
shrank as she did from the black pool, and yet could find no
refuge from it.

She took out her money from her purse and looked at it ;
she had still two-and-twenty shillings ; it would serve her for
many davs more, or it would help her to get on faster to Stony-
shire, within reach of Dinah. The thought of Dinah urged
itself more strongly now, since the experience of the night
had driven her shuddering imagination away from the pool.
If it had been only going to Dinah — if nobody besides Dinah
would ever know — Hetty could have made up her mind to go
to her. The soft voice, the pitying eyes, would have drawn
her. But afterward the other people must know, and she
could no more rush on that shame than she could rush on
death.

She must wander on and on, and wait for a lower depth
of despair to give her courage. Perhaps death would come
to her, for she was getting less and less able to bear the day's
weariness. And yet — such is the strange action of our souls,
drawing us by a lurking desire toward the very ends we dread
— Hetty, when she set out again for Norton, asked the straight-
est road northward toward Stonyshire, and kept it all that
da}''.

Poor wandering Hetty, with rounded childish face, and
the hard unloving, despairing soul looking out of it — with the
narrow heart and narrow thoughts, no room in them for any
sorrows but her own, and tasting that sorrow with the more
intense bitterness ! My heart bleeds for her as I see her toil-
ing along on her weary feet, or seated in a cart, with her eyes
fixed vacantly on the road before her, never thinking or caring
whither it tends, till hunger comes and makes her desire that
a village may be near.

What will be the end .'' the end of her objectless wander-
ing, apart from all love, caring for human beings only through
her pride, clinging to life only as the hunted wounded brute
clings to it ?

God preserve you and me from being the beginners of such
misery

ADAM BEDE. arx

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

THE QUEST.

The first ten days after Hetty's departure passed as quietly
as any other days with the family at the Hall Farm, and with
Adam at his daily work. They had expected Hetty to stay
away a week or ten days at least, perhaps a little longer if
Dinah came back with her, because there might then be some-
thing to detain them at Snowfield. But when a fortnight had
passed they began to feel a little surprise that Hetty did not
return ; she must surely have found it pleasanter to be with
Dinah than any one could have supposed. Adam, for his part,
was getting very impatient to see her, and he resolved that,
if she did not appear the next day (Saturday), he would set
out on Sunday morning to fetch her. There was no coach on
a Sunday ; but by setting out before it was light, and perhaps
getting a lift in a cart by the way, he would arrive pretty early
at Snowfield, and bring back Hetty the next day — Dinah too,
if she were coming. It was quite time Hetty came home, and
he would afford to lose his Monday for the sake of bringing
her.

His project was quite approved at the Farm when he went
there on Saturday evening. Mrs. Peyser desired him emphat-
ically not to come back without Hetty, for she had been quite
too long away, considering the things she had to get ready by
the middle of March, and a week was surely enough for any
one to go out for their health. As for Dinah, Mrs. Poyser hacl
small hope of their bringing her, unless they could make her
believe the folks at Hayslope were twice as miserable as the
folks at Snowfield. "Though," said Mrs. Poyser, by way of
conclusion, " you might tell her she's got but one aunt left,
and she's wasted pretty nigh to a shadder ; and we shall p'rhaps
all be gone twenty mile farther off her next Michaelmas, and
shall die o' broken hearts among strange folks, and leave the
children fatherless and motherless."

" Nay, nay," said Mr. Poyser. who certainly had the air of
a man perfectly heart-whole, " it isna so bad as that. Thee't
looking rarely now, and getting flesh every day. But I'd be
glad for Dinah t' come, for she'd help thee wi' the little uns j
they took t' her wonderful."

352

ADAM BEJXS.

So at daybreak, on Sunday, Adam set off. Seth went with
him the first mile or two, for the thought of Snowfield, and
the possibility that Dinah might come again made him rest-
less, and the walk with Adam in the cold morning air, both
in their best clothes, helped to give him a sense of Sunday
calm. It was the last morning in February, with a low gray
sky, and a slight hoar-frost on the green border of the road
and on the black hedges. They heard the gurgling of the
full brooklet hurrying down the hill, and the faint twittering
of the early birds. For ihey walked in silence, though with
a pleased sense of companionship.

" Good-by, lad," said Adam, laying his hand on Seth's
shoulder, and looking at him affectionately, as they were about
to part, " I wish thee wast going all the way wi' me, and as
happy as I am."

" I'm content, Addy, I'm content," i^^SA Seth, cheerfully.
" I'll be an old bachelor, belike, and mak^' a fuss wi' thy chil-
dren."

They turned away from each other, and Seth walked leis-
urely homeward, mentally repeating one of his favorite hymns
—he was very fond of hymns :

" Dark and cheerless is the morn

Unaccompanied Iiy thee :
Joyless is the day's return

Till thy mercy's beams I see :
Till hou inward light impart,
Glad my eyes and warm my heart.

" Visit, then, this soul of mine,

Pierce the 2;loom of sin and griai— ■
Fill me, Radiancy Divme,
Scatter all my unbelief.
More and more thyself display,
Shining to the perfect day."

Adam walked much faster, and any one coming along the
« >akbourne road at sunrise that morning must have had a
pleasant sight in this tall, broad-chested man, striding along
with a carriage as upright and firm as any soldier's, glancing
with keen glad eyes at the dark-blue hills as they began to
show themselves on his way. Seldom in Adam's life had his
face been so free from any cloud of anxiety as it was this
morning ; and this freedom from care, as is usual with con-
structive, practical minds like his, made him all the more ob-
servant of the objects round him, and all the more ready to
gather suggestions from them toward his own favorite plans
and ingenious contrivances. His happy love — the knowledge

ADAM BEDE. ,c-

that his steps were carrying him nearer and nearer to Hettv,
who was so soon to be his — was to his thoughts whac the
sweet morning air was to his sensations ; it gave him a con-
sciousness of well-being that made activity dehghtful. Every
now and then there was a rush of more intense feeling toward
her, which chased away other images than Hetty; and along
with that would come a wondering thankfulness' that all this
happiness was given to him — that this life of ours had such
sweetness in it. For our friend Adam had a devout mind,
though he was perhaps rather impatient of devout words ; and
his tenderness lay very close to his reverence, so that the one
could hardly be stirred without the other. But after feeling
had welled up and poured itself out in this way, busy though't
would come back with the greater vigor ; and this' mornino-
it was intent on schemes by which the roads might be \m-
proved that were so imperfect all through the country, and
on picturing all the benefits that might come from the exertion
of a smgle country gentleman, if he would set himself to get-
ting the roads made good in his own district.

It seemed a very short walk, the ten miles to Oakbourne,
that pretty town within sight of the blue hills, where he break-
fasted. After this, the country grew barer and barer ; no
more rolling woods, no more wide-branching trees near
frequent homesteads, no more bushy hedgerows ; but gray
stone walls intersecting the meagre pastures, and dismal wide-
scattered gray stone houses on broken lands where mines had
been and were no longer. " A hungry land," said Adam to
himself. " I'd rather go south'ard, wh'ere thev sav it's as fiat
as a table, than come to live here j though if' Dit'iah likes to
live in a country where she can be the most comfort to folks,
she's i' the right to live o' this side ; for she must look as if
she'd come straight from heaven, like th' angels in the desert,
to strengthen them as ha' got nothing t' eat." And when at
last he came in sight of Snowfield, he thought it looked like a
town that was "fellow to the country," though the stream
through the valley where the great mill stood gave a pleasant
greenness to the lower fields. The town lav, grim, stony, and
unsheltered, up the side of a steep hill, and' Adam did not go
forward to it at present, for Seth had told him where to find
Dinah. It was at a thatched cottage outside the town, a little
way from the mill — an old cottage, standing sidewavs toward
the road, with a little bit of potato-ground before It. Here
Dinah lodged with an elderly couple ; and if she and Hetty
happened to be out, Adam could learn where they were gone,

35'

ADAM BEDE,

or when they would be at home again. Dinah might oe oKf
on some preaching errand, and perhaps she would have lei't
Hetty at home. Adam could not help hoping this, and as he
recognized the cottage by the roadside before him, there
shone out in his face-that involuntary smile which belongs to
the expectation of a near joy.

He hurried his step along the narrow causeway, and rapped
at the door. It was opened by a very clean old woman with
a slow palsied shake of the head.

'' Is Dinah Morris at home ? " said Adam.

" Eh ? . . . . no," said the old woman, looking up at th.s
tall stranger with a wonder that made her slower of speech
than usual. " Will ye please to come in ? '' she added, retiring
from the door, as if recollecting herself. ''Why, ye're brother
to the young man as come afore, arena ye ? "

" Yes," said Adam, entering-. " That was Seth Bede. I'm
his brother Adam. He told me to give his respects to you
and your good master."

" Ay, the same t' him : he was a gracious young man. An'
ye feature him, on'y ye're darker. Sit ye down i' th' arm-chair.
My man isna come home from meeting."

Adam sat down patiently, not liking to hurry the shaking
old woman with questions, but looking eagerly toward the
narrow twisting stairs in one corner, for he thought it was pos-
sible Hetty might have heard his voice and would come down
them.

" So you're come to see Dinah Morris ? " said the old
woman, standing opposite to him. " An' you didna know
she was away from home, then ? "

"No," said Adam, " but I thought it likely she might be
away, seeing as it's Sunday. But the other young woman —
is she at home, or gone along with Dinah ? "

The old woman looked at Adam with a bewildered air.

'•Gene along wi' her?" she said. "Eh! Dinah's gone
to Leeds, a big town ye may ha' beared on, where there's a
many o' the Lord's people. She's been gone sin' Friday was
a fortnight : they sent her the money for her journey. You
may see her room here," she went on, opening a door, and
not noticing the effect of her words on Adam. He rose and
followed her, and darted an eager glance into the little room,
with its narrow bed, the portrait of Wesley on the wall, and
the few books lying on the large Bible. He had had an
irrational hope that Hetty might be there. He could not
speak in the first moment after seeing that the room was

ADAM BEDE.

355

empty ; an undefind fear had seized him — something had
happened to Hetty on the journey. Still, the old woman was
so slow of speech and apprehension, that Hetty might be at
Snowfield after all.

" It's a pity ye didna know," she said. " Have ye come
from )'our own country o' purpose to see her ? "

" But Hetty — Hetty Sorrel," said Adam, abruptly, " where
\%sheV'

" I know nobody by that name," said the old woman,
wonderingly. " Is it anybody ye've beared on at Snow-
field ? "

" Did there come no young woman here — very young and
pretty — Friday was a fortnight, to see Dinah Morris ? "

" Nay; I'n seen no young woman."

" Think ; are you quite sure ? A girl, eighteen years
old, with dark eyes and dark curly hair, and a red cloak on,
and a basket on her arm ? You couldn't forget her if you
saw her."

" Nay; Friday was a fortnight — it was the day as Dinah
went away — there come nobody. There's ne'er been nobody
asking for her till you come, for the folks about know as she's
gone. Eh dear, eh dear, is there summat the matter ? "

The old woman had seen the ghastly look of fear in
Adam's face, but he was not stunned or confounded ; he was
thinking eagerly where he could inquire about Hetty.

" Yes ; a young woman started from our country to see
Dinah, Friday was a fortnight. I came to fetch her back.
I'm afraid something has happened to her. I can't stop.
Good-by."

He hastened out of the cottage, and the old woman fol-
lowed him to the gate, watching him sadly wuth her shaking
head as he almost ran toward the town. He was going to
inquire at the place where the Oakbourne coach stopped

No ! no young woman like Hetty had been seen there.
Had any accident happened to the coach a fortnight ago }
No. And there was no coach to take him back to Oak-
bourne that day. Well, he would walk ; he couldn't stay
here, in wretched inaction. But the innkeeper, seeing that
Adam was in great anxiety, and entering in to this new inci-
dent with the eagerness of a man who passes a great deal of
■ time with his hands in his pockets looking into an obstinately
monotonous street, offered to take him back to Oakbourne in
his own " taxed cart " this very evening. It was not five
o'clock j there was plenty of time for Adam to take a meal,

2^5 ADAM BEDE.

and yet get to Oakbourne before ten o'clock. The inn-
keeper declared that he really wanted to go to Oakbourne,
and might as well go to-night ; he should have all Monday
before him then. Adam, after making an ineffectual attempt
to eat, put the food in his pocket, and, drinking a draught of
ale, declared himself ready to set off. As they approached
the cottage, it occurred to him that he would do well to learn
from the old woman where Dinah was to be found in Leeds ;
if there was trouble at the Hall Farm — he only half admitted
the foreboding that there would be — the Poysers might like
to send for Dinah. But Dinah had not left any address, and
the old woman, whose memory for names was infirm, could
not recall the name of the " blessed woman "' who was
Dinah's chief friend in the Society at Leeds.

During that long, long journey in the taxed cart, there
was time for all the conjectures of importunate fear and
struggling hope. In the very first shock of discovering that
Hetty had not been to Snowfield, the thought of Arthur had
darted through Adam like a sharp pang ; but he tried for
some time to ward off its return by busying himself with
modes of accounting for the alarming fact quite apart from
that intolerable thought. Some accident had happened.
Hetty had, by some strange chance, got into a wrong vehicle
from Oakbourne ; she had been taken ill, and did not want
to frighten them by letting them know. But this frail fence
of vague improbabilities was soon hurled aown by a rush of
distinct, agonizing fears. Hetty had been deceiving herself
in thinking that she could love and marry him ; she had been
loving Arthur all the while ; and now, in her desperation at
the nearness of their marriage, she had run away. And she
was gone to fmn. The old indignation and jealousy rose
again, and prompted the suspicion that Arthur had been
dealing falsely — had written to Hetty — had tempted her to
come to him — being unwilling, after all, that she should be-
long to another man besides himself. Perhaps the whole
thing had been contrived by him, and he had given her direc-
tions how to follow him to Ireland ; for Adam knew that
Arthur had been gone thither three weeks ago, having
recently learned it at the Chase. Every sad look of Hettv's,
since she had been engaged to Adam, returned upon him
now with all the exaggeration of painful retrospect. He had
been foolishly sanguine and confident. The poor thing
hadn't perhaps known Iier own mind for a long wliile ; had
thought that she could forget Arthur ; had been momentaril)

ADAM BEDE.

357

drawn toward the man who offered her a protecting, faithful
love. He couldn't bear to blame her ; she never meant to
cause him this dreadful pain. The blame lay with that man
who had selfishly played with her heart — had, perhaps, even
deliberately lured her away.

At Oakbourne, the hostler at the Royal Oak remembered
such a young woman as Adam described getting out of the
Treddleston coach more than a fortnight ago — wasn't likely
to forget such a pretty lass as that in a hurry — was sure she
had not gone on by the Buxton coach that went through
Snowfield, but had lost sight of her while he went away with
the horses, and had never set eyes on her again. Adam then
went straight to the house from which the Stoniton coach
started ; Stoniton was the most obvious place for Hetty lo go
to first, whatever might be her destination, for she would
hardly venture on any but the chief coach roads. She had
been noticed here too, and was remembered to have sat on
the box by the coachman ; but the coachman could not be
seen, for another man had been driving on the road in his
stead the last three or four days ; he could probably be seen
at Stoniton, through inquiry at the inn where the coach put
up. So the anxious, heart-stricken Adam must of necessity
wait and try to rest till morning — nay, till eleven o'clock, when
the coach started.

At Stoniton another delay occurred, for the old coachman
who had driven Hetty would not be in the town again till
night. When he did come, he remembered Hetty well, and
remembered his own joke addressed to her, quoting it many
times to Adam, and observing with equal frequency that he
thought there was something more than common, because
Hetty had not laughed when he joked with her. But he de-
clared, as the people had done at the inn, that he had lost
sight of Hetty directly she got down. Part of the next morn-
ing was consumed in inquiries at every house in the town
from which a coach started — (dW in vain ; forvou know Hetty
did not start from Stoniton bv coach, but on foot in the gray
mornin^:) — and then in walking out to the first toll-gates on
the different lines of road, in the forlorn hope of finding
some recollection of her there. No. she was not to be traced
any farther ; and the next hard task for Adam was to go home,
and carrv the wretched tidin2:s to the Hall Farm. As to what
he should do bevond that, he had come to two distinct reso-
lutions among the tumult of thought and feelins: which was
going on within him while he went to and fro. He would not

^cg ADAM BEDE.

mention what he knew of Arthur Donnithorne's behavior tQ
Hetty till there was a clear necessity for it; it was still possi-
ble Hetty might come back, and the necessity might be an
injury or an offence to her. And as soon as he had been at
home, and done what was necessary there to prepare for his
farther absence, he would start off to Ireland , if he found
no trace of Hetty on the road, he would go straight to Arthur
Donnithorne, and make himself certain how far he was ac-
quainted with her movements. Several times the thought oc-
curred to him that he would consult Mr. Irwine ; but that
would be useless, unless he told him all, and so betrayed the
secret about Arthur. It seems strange that Adam, in the in-
cessant occupation of his mind about Hetty, should never
have alighted on the probability that she had gone to Wind-
sor, ignorant that Arthur was no longer there. Perhaps the
reason was, that he could not conceive Hetty's throwing her-
self on Arthur uncalled ; he imagined no cause that could
have driven her to such a step, after that letter written to
her in August. There were but two alternatives in his mind :
either Arthur had written to her again, and enticed her away,
or she had simply fled from her approaching marriage with
himself, because she found out after all, she could not love
him well enough, and yet was afraid of her friends' anger if
she retracted.

With this last determination on his mind, of going straight
to Arthur, the thought that he had spent two days in inquiries
which had proved to be almost useless was torturing to Adam ;
and yet since he would not tell the Poysers his conviction as
to where Hetty was gone, or his intention to follow her thither,
he must be able to say to them that he had traced her as far

as possible. , • i . i k a

It was after twelve o'clock on Tuesday night when Adam
reached Treddleston ; and unwilling to disturb his mothev
and Seth, and also to encounter their questions at that hour,
he threw himself without undressing on a bed at the W agon
Overthrown," and slept hard from pure weariness. Not more
than four hours, however ; for before five o'clock he set out
on his way home in the faint morning twilight. He always
kept a key of the workshop door in his pocket, so that he
could let himself in ; and he wished to enter without awaking
his mother, for he was anxious to avoid telling her the new
trouble himself, bv seeing Seth first, and asking him to tell
her when it should be necessary. He walked gently along
the yard, and turned the key gently in the dooi ; but, as he

ADAM BEDE. -.^

expected, Gyp, who lay in the workshop, gave a sharp bark.
It subsided when he saw Adam, holding up his finger at him*
to impose silence ; and in his dumb, tailless joy he must
content himself with rubbing his body against his master's legs.
Adam was too heart-sick to take notice of Gyp's fondling
He threw himself on the bench, and stared dully at the wood
and the signs of work around him, wondering if he should ever
XT^fK^.l^^' r'-a<;„re in them again ; while Gyp, dimlv aware

that there was something wrong uui/u;^ .^ -^/„ u;^ u.v V1T\

grayhead on Adam's knee, and wrinkled his brows to bokup
at him. Hitherto, since Sunday afternoon, Adam had been
constantly among strange people and in strange places, havino-
no associations with the details of his daily life, and now that
by the light of this new morning he was come back to his
home, and surrounded by the familiar objects that seemed for-
ever robbed of their charm, the reality— the hard, inevitable
reality of his troubles pressed upon him with a new weio-ht.
Right before him was an unfinished chest of drawers, whicli
he had been making in spare moments for Hetty's use when
his home should be hers.

Seth had not heard Adam's entrance, but he had been
roused by Gyp's bark, and Adam heard him moving about in
the room above, dressing himself. Seth's first thoughts were
about his brother ; he would come home to-day, surely, for the
business would be wanting him sadly by to-morrow, but it was
pleasant to think he had had a longer holiday than he had ex-
pected. And would Dinah come too t Seth felt that that was
the greatest happiness he could look forward to for himself
though he had no hope left that she would ever love him well
enough to marry him ; but he had often said to himself, it was
better to be Dinah's friend and brother than any other woman's
husband. If he could but be always near her, instead of liv-
mg so far off !

He came down stairs and opened the inner door leading
trom the house-place into the workshop, intending to let out
Gyp ; but he stood still in the doorwav, smitten with a sudden
shock at the sight of Adam seated listlessly on the bench, pale
unwashed, with sunken blank eyes, almost like a drunkard in
the morning. But Seth felt in an instant what the marks meant ;
not drunkenness, but some great calamity. Adam looked up
at him without speaking, and Seth moved forward toward the
bench himself trembling so that speech did not come readily.
God have mercy on us, Addy," he said in a low voice,
Sitting down on the bench beside Adam, " what is it ? "

360 ADAM SSDE.

Adam was unable to speak ; the strottf ftiart, accustomed to
suppress the signs of sorrow, had felt his heart swell like a
child's at the first approach of sympathy. He fell on Seth's
neck and sobbed.

Seth was prepared for the worst, now, for, even in his re-
collections of their boyhood, Adam had never sobbed before.

" Is it death, Adam ? Is she dead ? " he asked, in a low
tone, when Adam raised his heaH or.A —. . .^^uvermg himself,
ixu, lau , uut sne's gone — gone away from us. She's
never been to Snowfield. Dinah's been gone to Leeds ever
since last Friday was a fortnight, the very day Hetty set out.
I can't find out where she went after she got to Stoniton."

Seth was silent from utter astonishment ; he knew nothing
that could suggest a reason to him for Hetty's going away.

" Hast any notion what she's done it for .? " he said, at last.

" She can't ha' loved me : she didn't like our marriage w])en
it came nigh — that must be it," said Adam. He had deter-
mined to mention no farther reason.

" I hear mother stirring," said Seth. " i\Iust we tell her ? "

" No, not yet," said Adam, rising from the bench, and
pushing the hair from his face, as if he wanted to rouse him-
self. " I can't have her told yet ; and I must set out on an-
other journey directly, after I've been to the village and th'
Hall Farm. I can't tell thee where I'm going, and thee must
say to her I'm gone on business as nobody is to know anything
about. I'll go and wash myself now." Adam moved toward
the door of the workshop, but after a step or two he turned
round, and meeting Seth's eyes with a calm sad glance, he said,
" I must take all the money out o' the tin box, lad ; but if any-
thing happens to me, all the rest '11 be thine, to take care o'
mother with."

Seth was pale and trembling ; he felt there was some ter-
rible secret under all this. " Brother," he said, faintly — he
never called Adam " brother," except in solemn moments — " I
don't believe you'll do anything as you can't ask God's bless-
ing on."

" Nay, lad," said Adam, " don't be afraid. I'm for doing
nought but what's a man"s duty."

The thought that if he betrayed his trouble to his mother
she would only distress him bywords, half of blundering aflfec-
tion. half of irrepressible triumph that Hetty proved as unfit to
be his wife as she had always foreseen, brought back some of
his habitual firmness and self-command. He had felt ill on
his journey home — he told her when she came down — had staid

ADAM BEDE. ,^

36r

fhirX^l f Treddleston for that reason ; and a bad headache,
that still hung about him this morning, accounted for his pale-
ness and heavy eyes. ^

^.r.ft t^^'r'"^"^ ^? ^° ^° ^^'^ ^'^"^^-^' ^" the first place, at-
tend to his business for an hour, and give notice to Burge of
his being obliged to go on a journey, which he must beg him
T. R n '^''°" ^° ^"Z °"^ ' ^°' ^^ ^"^hed to avoid going to
the Hall Farm near breakfast-time, when the children and ser-
vants would be in the house-place, and there must be exclama-
tions in their hearing about his having returned without Hetty
He waited until the clock struck nine before he left the work-
yard at the village, and set off, through the lields, toward the
i-arm. It was an immense relief to him, as he came near the
Home Close, to see Mr. Poyser advancing toward him, for this
would spare him the pam of going to the house. Mr. Povser
was walking briskly this March morning, with a sense of Sp'rin^
business on his mind ; he was going to cast the master's eye on
the shoeing of a new cart-horse, carrying his spud as a useful
TTT^^^' '^t ''1- ^^^ ^"^P"^^ "-^^ great when he caught
of evil '''^' "°^ ^ ""^^ ^'^^'' ^° presentiments

,„o" ^^¥ ^^u"^' ^^^' ^''t 5^°" • ^a" ye been all this time
aw^ay and not brougnt the lasses back, after all ? Where are

,." ^O' I've not brought 'em," said Adam, turning round to
indicate that he wished to walk back with Mr. Poyser

Why, said Martin, looking with sharper attention at
Adam, ye look bad. Is there anything happened > "

T A- ^ ^^A^^^''^ ^'^^'^^ heavily. " A sad thing's happened.
I didna find Hetty at Snowtield."

Mr Poyser's good-natured face showed signs of troubled
astonishment. " Not find her > What's happened to her ? "

Til t^^°"S^t^ %^"& at once to bodilv accident.

Ihat I can't tell, whether anything's 'happened to her
bhe never went to Snowfield— she took the coach to Stoniton
but I can t learn nothing of her after she got down from the
otoniton coach.

^,.^A^^^^' -^"^ ^°""^ ^^^"^ ^^'^'s ^"" away ? " said Martin,
standing still so puzzled and bewildered that the fact did not
yet make itself felt as a trouble by him.

"She must ha' done," said Adam. " She didn't like our

mfSV r r ^^T ^° ^^'^ point-that must be it. She'd
mistook her feelings.

Martin was silent for a minute or two, looking on the ground

362 ADAM BEDE.

and rooting up the grass with his spud, without knowing what
he was doing. His usual slowness was always trebled when
the subject of speech was painful. At last he looked up, right
in Adam's face, saying,

" Then she didna deserve t' ha' ye, my lad. An' I feel i'
fault myself, for she was my niece, and I was allays hot for her
marr'ing ye. There's no amends I can make ye, lad — the
more's the pity ; it's a sad cut-up for ye, I doubt."

Adam could say nothing ; and Mr. Poyser, after pursuing
his walk for a little while, went on :

'• I'll be bound she's gone after trying to get a lady's-maid's
place, for she'd got that in her head half a year ago, and want-
ed me to gi' my consent. But I'd thought better on her," he
added, shaking his head slowly and sadl)' — " I'd thought bet-
ter on her nor to look for this, after she'd gi'en y' her word,
an' everything had been got ready."

Adam had the strongest motives for encou'-aging this sup-
position in Mr. Poyser and he even tried to believe that it
might possibly be true. He had no warrant for the certainty
that she was gone to Arthur.

" It was better as it should be so," he said, as quietly as he
could, " if she felt she couldn't like me for a husband. Bet-
ter run away before than repent after. I hope you won't look
harshly on her if she comes back, as she may do if she finds it
hard to get on away from home."

" I canna look on her as I'n done before," said Martin,
decisively. " She's acted bad by you, and by all on us. But
I'll not turn my back on her ; she's but a young un, and it's
the first harm I'n kjiowed on her. It'll be a hard job for me
to tell her aunt. Why didna Dinah come back wi' ye 1 She'd
ha' helped to pacify her aunt a bit."

" Dinah wasn't at Snowfield. She's been gone to Leeds
this fortnight; and I couldn't learn from th' old woman any
direction where she is at Leeds, else I should ha' brought it
you."

" She'd a deal better be staying wi' her own kin," said Mr.
Poyser, indignantly, " than going preeching among strange
folks a-t'iat-'n."

" I must leave you now, Mr. Poyser," said Adam, "for I've
a deal to see to."

" Ay, you'd best be after your business, and I must tell th*
missis when I go home. It's a hard job."

*' But," said Adam, " I beg particular you'll keep what's

ADAM BEDE. 363

happened quiet for a week or two. I've not told my mother
yet, and there's no knowing how things may turn out."

" Ay, ay ; least said, soonest mended. We'n no need to
say why the match is broke off, an' we may hear of her after
a bit. Shake hands \vi' me, lad ; I wished I could make thee
amends."

There was something in Martin Poyser's throat at that mo-
ment which caused him to bring out those scanty words in
rather a broken fashion. Yet Adam knew what they meant
all the better ; and the two honest men grasped each other's
hard hands in mutual understanding.

There was nothing now to hinder Adam from setting off.
He had told Seth to go to the Chase, and leave a message
for the squire, saying that Adam Bede had been obliged to
start off suddenly on a journey — and to say as much, and
no more, to any one else who made inquiries about him. If
the Poysers learned that he was gone away again, Adam knew
they would infer that he was gone in search of Hetty.

He had intended to go right on his way from the Hall
Farm ; but now the impulse which had frequently visited him
before — to go to Mr. Irwine, and make a confidant of him —
recurred with the new force which belongs to a last oppor-
tunity. He was about ;o start on a long journey — a difficult
one — by sea — and no soul would know where he was gone.
If anything happened to him ? or, if he absolutely needed help
in any matter concerning Hetty ? Mr. Irwine was to be
trusted ; and the feeling which made Adam shrink from tell-
ing anything which was her secret, must give way before the
need there was that she should have some one else besides
himself, who would be prepared to defend her in the worst
extremity. Toward Arthur, even though he might have in-
curred no new guilt, Adam felt that he was not bound to keep
silence when Hetty's interest called on him to speak.

" I must do it," said Adam, when these thoughts, which
had spread themselves through hours of hi-s sad journeying,
now rushed upon him in an instant, like a wave that had been
slowly gathering ; " it's the right thing. I can't stand alone
in this way any longer."

364 ADAM BEDE.

CHAPTER XXXIX.

THE TIDINGS.

Adam turned his face toward Broxton, and walked with
his swiftest stride, looking at his watch with the fear that Mr,
Irwine might be gone out; — hunting, perhaps. The fear and
haste together produced a state of strong excitement before
he reached the Rectory gate ; and outside it he saw the deep
marks of a recent hoof on the gravel.

But the hoofs were turned toward the gate, not away from
it ; and though there was a horse against the stable door, it
was not Mr. Irwine's ; it had evidently had a journey this
morning, and must belong to some one who had come on
business. Mr. Irwine was at home, then ; but Adam could
hardly find breath and calmness to tell Carrol that he wanted
to speak to the rector. The double suffering of certain and
uncertain sorrow had begun to shake the strong man. The
butler looked at him wonderingly, as he threw himself on a
bench in the passage and stared absently at the clock on the
opposite wall ; the master had somebody with him, he said,
but heard the study door open — the stranger seemed to be
coming out, and as Adam was in a hurry, he would let the
master know at once.

Adam sat looking at the clock ; the minute-hand was hur-
rying along the last five minutes to ten, with a loud, hard, in-
different tick, and Adam watched the movement and listened
to the sound as if he had had some reason for doing so. In
our times of bitter suffering, there are almost always these
pauses, when our consciousness is benumbed to everything
but some trivial preception or sensation. It is as if semi-
idiocy came to give us rest from the memory and the dread
which refuse to leave us in our sleep.

Carrol coming back, recalled Adam to the sense of his
burden. He was to go into the study immediately. " I can't
think what that strange person's come about," the butler
added, from mere incontinence of remark, as he preceded
Adam to the door; "he's gone i' the dining-room. And
master looks unaccountable — as if he was frightened." Adam
took no notice of the words ; he could not care about other
people's business. But when he entered the study and looked

ADAM BEDS -^(^^

in Mr. Irwine's face, he felt in an instant that there was a
new expression in it, strangely different from the warm friend-
Hness it had always worn for him before, A letter lay open
on the table, and Mr. Irwine's hand was on it; but the
changed glance he cast on Adam could not be owing entirelv
to preoccupation with some disagreeable business, for he was
looking eagerly toward the door, as if Adam's entrance was
a matter of poignant anxiety to him.

" You want to speak to me, Adam," he said, in that low,
constrainedly quiet tone which a man uses when he is deter-
mined to suppress agitation. " Sit down here." He pointed
to a chair just opposite to him, at no more than a yard's dis-
tance from his own, and Adam sat down with a sense that
this cold manner of Mr. Irwine's gave an additional unex-
pected difficulty to his disclosure. But when Adam had
made up his mind to a measure, he was not the man to re-
nounce it for any but imperative reasons.

" I come to you, sir," he said, " as the gentleman I look
up to most of anybody. " I've something very painful to tell
you — something as it'll pain you to hear as well as me to tell.
But if I speak o' the wrong other people have done, you'll
see I didn't speak till I'd good reason."

Mr. Irwine noddedslowly, and Adam went on rather trem-
ulously.

" You was t' ha' married me and Hetty Sorrel, you know,
sir, o' the fifteenth o' this month. I thought she loved me,
and I was th' happiest man i' th' parish. But a dreadful
blow's come upon me."

Mr. Irwine started up from his chair, as if involuntarily,
but then, determined to control himself, walked to the window
and looked out.

" She's gone away, sir, and we don't know where. She
said she was going to Snowfield o' Friday was a fortnight, and
I went last Sunday to fetch her back ; but she'd never been
there, and she took the coach to Stoniton, and beyond that I
can't trace her. But now I'm going a long journey to look fof
her, and I can't trust to anybody but, you where I'm going."

Mr. Irwine came back from the window and sat down.

"Have you no idea of the reason why she went away.? '*
he said

" It's plain enough she did't want to marry me, sir," said
Adam. " She did't like it when it came so near. But that
Jsn't all, I doubt. There's something else I must tell you,
sir. There's somebody else concerned besides me."

*66 ADAM BEDE.

A gleam of something — it was almost like relief or joy —
came across the eager anxiety of Mr. Irwine's face at that
moment. Adam was looking on the ground, and paused a
little : the next words were hard tc speak. But when he
went on, he lifted up his head and looked straight at Mr.
Irwine. He would do the thing he had resolved to do with-
out flinching.

"You know who's the man I've reckoned my greatest
friend," he said, " and used to be proud to think as I should
pass my life i' working for him, and had felt so ever since we
were lads "...

Mr. Irwine, as if all self-control had forsaken him, grasped
Adam's arm, which lay on the table, and, clutching it tightly
like a man in pain, said, with pale lips and a low, hurried
voice.

" No, Adam, no ; don't say it, for God's sake ! "
Adam, surprised at the violence of Mr. Irwine's feeling,
repented of the words that had passed his lips, and sat in dis-
tressed silence. The grasp on his arm gradually relaxed, and
Mr. Irwine threw himself back in his chair, saying, '* Go on
— I must know it."

" That man played with Hetty's feelings, and behaved to
her as he'd no right to do to a girl in her station o' life —
made her presents, and used to go and meet her out a-walk-
ing : I found it out only two days before he went away-— found
him a-kissing her as they were parting in the Grove. There'd
been nothing said between me and Hetty then, though I'd
loved her for a long while, and she knew it. But I reproached
him with his wrong actions, and words and blows passed be-
tween us ; and he said solemnly to me, after that, as it had
been all nonsense, and no more than a bit o' flirting.^ But I
made him write a letter to tell Hetty he'd meant nothing ; for
I saw clear enough, sir, by several things as I hadn't under-
stood at the time, as he'd got hold of her heart, and I thought
she'd belike go on thinking of him. and never come to love an-
other man as wanted to marry her. And I gave her the letter,
and she seemed to bear it all after a while better than I'd ex-
pected .... and she behaved kinder and kinder to me . . .
I dare say she didn't know hei own feelings then, poor thing,
and they came back upon her when it was too late ... I
don't want to blame her ... I can't think as she meant to
deceive me. But I was encouraged to think she loved me,
and — you know the rest, sir. But it's on my mind as he's
been false to me, and ticed her away, and she's gone to him

ADAM BEDE. >

307

--and I'm going now to see; for I can never go to work
again till I know what's become of her "

During Adam's narrative, Mr. Irwine had had time to re-
cover his self-mastery in spite of the painful thoughts that
crowded upon him It was a bitter ren.embrance to' h m now
-that morning when Arthur breakfasted with him and

nZl'' 1'^' "''r\^^^^ "^^^^ °f ^ confession. Tt tas
plam enough now what he had wanted to confess And if
their words had taken another turn ... if he himself had
been ess fastidious about intruding on another ma'slecets

for,; llil "'"' '" '^"^ ^°^^' ^^^" ^ fi^"^ had shut out rescue
form all this guilt and misery. He saw the whole historv now

In tLta"f i"r-^^--,-hich the present sS'bTck
upon tlie past. But every other feel ng as it rushed unnn him
was thrown into abeyance by pity, de^ep respectful^itv for
vi?hT.H hr° T' ^'^"^t ^^"^-^I^e^dy so bruised, going fonh
^vlth sad blind resignedness to an unreal sorrow, while a real
one was close upon him, too far beyond the range of common
tria for him ever to have feared I His own\gkation was
quelled by a certain awe that comes over us in the presence
of a great anguish ; for the anguish he must inflict on IS
was already present to him. Again he put his hand on th^

s'olemnl^V'' " '" '''''' '"' ^-^^^ ^-^'3^ ^^ time:ashes^d

vour lffe^"'v!!|'^ ^^^\ ^"'"''' ^'"^ ^''■' ^"^ ^°"^^ h^^d trials in
fnlW r ^ ^^" ^^'■ '°'''°^'' "^^"fu"y, as well as act man-

fully: God requires both tasks at our hands. And there is a
heavier sorrow coming upon you than anv you have ye known

Codn 'v "°\g"%-y°" l^ave not the iorst of all sorrows
trod help him who has ! " ^^luns.

The two pale faces looked at each other ; in Adam's there

.o.:i.''T,e1s^rr„;.s"h-n'^sZ3 Sheis„o.gooe

h^v^tT ^^Tt"^ ""? ^''°"' ^'^ ^^'^''^ ^^ '^ h^ thought he could
have eaped to her that moment. But Mr. Irwine laid hold of

So feTatTowm"^ " ' ^^^^^^^'^'^^^^ "Wait, Adam wait."
it wor?e^fnV' l"" ^7Z^ ""happy position-one which will make
her ?o?ever'''^ ' ""^ P°°' ^'''"^' ''^"" ^° ^^^'^ ^°^'

mo 'td w "P' "J°'t^ tremulously, but no sound came. They
mo.'ed again, and whispered, " Tell me." ^

368

ADAM BRDE.

" She has been arrested .... she is in prison."

It was as it an insulting blow had brought back the spirit
of resist.mce into Adam. The blood rushed to his face, and
he said loudly and sharply,

" For what t "

" For a great crime — the murder of her child."

"It cant be !" Adam almost shouted, starting up from his
chair, and making a stride toward the door; but he turned
round again, setting his back against the book-case, and Jook-
ing fiercely at Mr. irwine. " It isn't possible. She never had
a child. She can't be guilty. /F/^t; says it ? "

"God grant she may be innocent, Adam. We can still
hope she is."

" But who says she is guilty ? " said Adam, violently.
" Tell me everything."

" Here is a letter from the magistrate before whom she was
taken, and the constable who arrested her is in the dining-
room. She will not confess her name or where she comes
from ; but I fear, 1 fear there can be no doubt it is Hetty.
The description of her person corresponds, only that she is
said to look very pale and ill. She had a small red-leather
pocket-book in her pocket, with two names written in it — one
at the beginning, ' Hetty Sorrel, Hayslope,' and the other near
the end, • Dinah Morris, Snowfield.' She will not say which
is her own name — she denies everything, and will answer no
questions ; and application has been made to me, as a magis-
trate, that I may take measures for identifying her, for ir was
thought probable that the name which stands first is her own
name."

" But what proof have they got against her, if it is Hetty ? "
said x\dam, still violently, with an etfort that seemed to shake
his whole frame. " I'll not believe. It couldn't ha' been, and
none of us kno\Y it."

"Terrible proof that she was under the temptadon to
commit the crime ; but we have room to hope that she did not
really commit ii. Try and read that letter, Adam."

Adam took the letter between his shaking hands, and tried
to fix his eyes steadily on it. Mr. Irwine meanwhile went out
to give some orders. When he came back, Adam's eves were
still on the first page — he couldn't read — he coulcl not put
the words together and make out what they meant. He threw
it down at last, and clenched his fist.

" It's his doing," he said ; "if there's been any CTime, it's
at his door, not at hers. He taught her to deceive — he de-

ADAM BEDS. g

ceived me first. Let 'em put him on his trial— let him stand
in court beside her, and I'll tell 'em how he got hold of her
heart, and 'ticed her t' evil, and then lied to me. Is he to go
free, while they lay all the punishment on her . . . so weak and
young } "

The image called up by these last words gave a newdirec-
tion to poor Adam's maddened feelings. He was silent, look-
ing at the corner of the room, as if he saw something there
I hen he burst out again, in a tone of appealing anguish

"I can't bear it ... O God, it's too hard to lay upon me-
lt s too hard to think she's wicked."

Mr. Irwine had sat down again in silence ; he was too wise
to utter soothing words at present, and indeed the sight of
Adam before him, with that look of sudden age which some-
times comes over a young face in moments of terrible emotion
—the hard bloodless look of the skin, the deep lines about the
quivering mouth, the furrows in the brow— the sight of this
strong firm man shattered by the invisible stroke of sorrow
moved hmi so deeply that speech was not easy. Adam stood
motionless, with his eyes vacantly fixed in this way for a min-
ute or two ; m that short space he was living through all his
love again.

" She can't ha' done it," he said, still without movin<^ his
eyes, as if he were only talking to himself ; " it was fear made
her hide it . . I forgive her for deceiving me ... I forgive
thee, Hetty . . . thee wast deceived too . . . it's gone har^i
wi thee, my poor Hetty ... but they'll never make me be-
lieve It."

• ^f ^^^ ^^^^"'^ ^S^^" ^°^ ^ f^w moments, and then he said
with fierce abruptness,

"I'll go to him— I'll bring him back— I'll make him go
and look at her in her misery— he shall look at her till he can't
torget it--it shall follow him night and day— as long as he
lives It shall follow him— he shan't escape wi' lies this time—
1 11 fetch him, I'll drag him myself."

,Von " ^^! fct of going toward the door, Adam paused automat-
ically and looked about for his hat, quite unconscious where
\1 ^fl^^ ? ^^'^ present with him. Mr. Irwine had fol-

zpsiit.r '"' ''" '^ ''' ""' "^^"^ ^" ^ ^"^^^'

«,i.JJ^°' j^"^^™^""/ ^'"^ ^^'^^ y°" ^i^l wish to stav and see
what good can be done for her, instead of going on^a useless

vn^fr .•-? ^S^g^t""^; ^"^^ Punishment will surely fall without
your aid. Besides, he is no longer in Ireland j he must be on

370 ADAM BEDE.

his way kome — or would be long before you arrived ; for his
grandfather, I know, wrote for him to come at least ten days
ago. I want you now to go with me to Stoniton. I have or-
dered a horse for you to ride with us, as soon as you can com-
pose yourself."

While Mr. Irwine was speaking, Adam recovered his con-
sciousness of the actual scene ; he rubbed his hair off his fore-
head and listened.

"Remember," Mr. Irwine went on, "there are others to
think of, and act for, besides yourself, Adam ; there are Hetty's
friends, the good Poysers, on whom this stroke will fall more
heavily than I can bear to think. I expect it from your
strength of mind, Adam — from your sense of duty to God and
man — that you will try to act as long as action can be of any
use."

In reality, Mr. Irwine proposed this journey to Stoniton
for Adam's own sake. Movement, with some object before
him, was the best means of counteracting the violence of suf-
fering in these first hours.

" You win go with me to Stoniton, Adam ? " he said again,
after a moment's pause. " We have to see if it is really Hetty
who is there, you know."

" Yes, sir," said Adam, " I'll do what you think right. But
the folks at th' Hall Farm .? "

" I wish them not to know till I return to tell them myself.
I shall have ascertained things then which I am uncertain
about now, and I shall return as soon as possible. Come now,
the horses are ready."

CHAPTER XL.

TIJE BITTER WATERS SPREAD.

Mr. Irwine returned from Stoniton in a post-chaise that
night, and the first words Carrol said to him, as he entered
the house, were, that Squire Donnithorne was dead — found
dead in his bed at ten o'clock that morning — and that Mrs.
Irwine desired him to say she should be awake when Mr.
Irwine came home, and she begged him not to go to bed with-
out seeing her.

ADAM BEDE.

371

"Wei!, Dauphin," Mrs. Irwine said, as her son entered her
room, "^you're come at last. So the old gentleman's fidgeti-
ness and low spirits, which made him send for Arthur in that
sudden way, really meant something. I suppose Carrol ha.s
told you that Donnithorne was found dead in his bed this
morning. You will believe my prognostications another time,
though I dare say I shan't iive to prognosticate anything but
my own death."

"What have they done about Arthur?" said Mr. Irwine.
" Sent a messenger to await him at Liverpool ? "

" Yes, Ralph was gone before the news was brought to us.
Dear Arthur, I shall live now to see him master at the Chase,
and making good times on the estate, like a generous-hearted
fellow as he is. He'll be as happy as a king now."

Mr. Irwine could not help giving a slight groan : he was
worn with anxiety and exertion, and his mother's light words
were almost intolerable.

" What are you so dismal about, Dauphin ? Is there any
bad news .? Or are you thinking of the danger for Arthur in
crossing that frightful Irish Channel at this time of year? "

" No, mother, I'm not thinking of that ; but I'm not pre-
pared to rejoice just now."

" You've been worried by this law business that you've
bean to Stoniton about. What in the world is it, that you
can't tell me ? "

" You will know by and by, mother. It would not be right
for me to tell you at present. Good-night : you'll sleep now
you have no longer anything to listen for."

Mr. Irwine gave up his intention of sending a letter to meet
Arthur, since it would not now hasten his return : the n<;ws of
his grandfather's death would bring him as soon as he could
possibly come. He could go to bed nov*' and get some need-
ful rest, before the time came for the morning's heavy duty of
carrying his sickening news to the Hall Farm and to Adam's
home.

Adam himself was not come back from Stoniton, for
though he shrank from seeing Hetty, he could not bear to go
to a distance from her again.

" It's no use, sir," he said to the rector — " it's no use for
me to go back. I can't go to work aiain v.hile she's here ;
and I couldn't bear the sight o' the things and folks round
home. I'll take a bit of a room here, where I can see the
prison walls, and perhaps I shall get, in time, to bear seeing
herr

372

ADAM BEDE.

Adam bad not been shaken in his belief that Hetty was
innocent of the crime she was charged with, for Mr. Irwine,
feeHng tb it the beUef in her guilt would be a crushing addi-
tion to /• lam's load, had kept from him the facts which left
no hope in his own mind. There was not any reason for
thrustiing the whole burden on Adam at once, and Mr. Irwine,
at parting, only said, " If the evidence should tell too strongly
ao;ainst her, Adam, we may still hope for a pardon. Her
youth and other circumstances will be a plea for her."

" Ah ! and it's right people should know liow she was
tempted into the wrong way," said Adam, with bitter earnest-
ness. "It's right they should know it was a fine gentleman
made love to her, and turned her head wi' notions. You'll
remember, sir, you've promised to tell my molher, and Seth,
and the people at the Farm, who it was as led her wrong, else
they'll think harder of her than she deserves. You'll be doing
her adiurt by sparing him, and I hold him the guiltiest before
God, let her ha' done what she may. If you spare him, I'll
expose him ! "

"I think your demand is just, Adam,'' said Mr. Irwine,
" but when you are calmer, you will judge Arthur more merci-
fully. I say nothing now, only that his punishment is in other
hands than ours."

Mr. Irwine felt it hard upon him that he should have to
tell of Arthur's sad part in the storv of sin and sorrow — he
who cared for Arthur with fatherly affection — who had cared
for him with fatherly pride. Bathe saw clearly that the secret
must be known before long, even apart from Adam's deter-
mination, since it was scarcely to be supposed that Hetty would
persist to the end in her obstinate silence. He made up his
mind to withhold nothing from the Poysers, but to tell them
the worst at once, for there was no time to rob the tidings of
their suddenness. Hetty's trial must come on at the Lent
assizes, and they were to be held at Stoniton the next week.
It was scarcely to be hoped that Martin Poyser could escape
the pain of being called as a witness, and it was better he
should know everything as long beforehand as possible.

Before ten o'clock on Thursday morning tl^e home at the
Hall Farm was a house of mourning for a misfortune felt to
be worse than death. The sense of family dishonor was too
keen, even in the kind-hearted Martin Poyser the younger,
to leave room for any compassion toward Hett^^ He and his
father were simple-minded farmers, proud of their untarnished
character, oroud that they came of a famil^^- which had held

ADAM BEDS. ,y.

up Its head and paid its way as far back as its name was in
the parish register ; and Hetty had brought disgrace on them
all— disgrace that could never be wiped out That was the
all-conquering feeling in the mind both of father and son— the
scorching sense of disgrace, which neutralized all other sensi-
bility ; and Mr. Irwine was struck with surprise to observe
that Mrs. Poyser was less severe than her husband. We are
often startled by the severity of mild people on exceptional
occasions ; the reason is, that mild people are most likely to
be under the yoke of traditional impressions.

" I'm willing to pay any money as is wanted toward trying
to get her off," said ]\Iartin the younger, when Mr.- Irwine
was gone, while the old grandfather was crying in the opposite
chair, ''but I'll not go nigh her, nor ever see her again, by mv
own will. She's made our bread bitter to us for all our lives
to come, an' we shall ne'er hold up our heads i' this parish
nor i' any other. The parson talks of folks pityin' us ; it's
poor amends pity '11 make us."

" Pity ! " said the grandfather, sharply. " I ne'er wanted
folks's pity i' myXxit afore . . . an' Imun begin to be looked
down on now, an' me turned seventy-two last St. Thomas's, an'
all th' under-bearers and pall-bearers as I'n picked for my fu-
neral are i' this parish an' the next to 't. . . . It's o' no use
now. ... I mun be ta'en to the grave by strangers."

" Don't fret so, father," said Mrs. Poyser, who had spoken
very little, being almost overawed by her husband'-s unusual
hardness and decision. " You'll have your children wi' you :
and there's the lads and the little un '11 grow up in a new"
parish as well as i' th' old un."

" Ah ! there's no staying i' this country for us now," said
Mr. Poyser, and the hard tears trickled slowlvdown his round
cheeks. " We thought it 'ud be bad luck if th' old squird
gave us notice this Lady-day, but I must gi' notice myself now,
an' see if there can anybody be got to come an' take to the
crops as I'n put i' the ground ; for I wonna stay upo' that
man's land a day longer nor I'm forced to 't. An' me, as
thought him such a good, upright young man, as I should be
be glad when he come to be our landlord. I'll ne'er lift my hat
to'm again, nor sit i' the same church wi' 'm . . . a man aa
has brought shame on respectable folks . . . an' pretended to
be such a friend to ever>'body. . . . Poor Adam there ... a
fine friend he's been t' Adam, making speeches an' talking so
fine, an' all the while poisonipg the lad's life, as it's much if
he can stay i' this country any more nor we can."

374

ADAM BEDE.

" An' you t' ha' to go into court and own you're akin t'
her," said the old man. " Why, they'll cast it up to the little
un as isn't four 'ear old, some day — they'll cast it up t' her as
she'd a cousin tried at the 'sizes for murder."

" It'll be their own wickedness, then," said Mrs. Poyser,
with a sob in her voice. "But there's one above 'uU take
care of the innicent child, else it's but little truth they tell us
at church. It'll be harder nor ever to die an' leave the little
uns, an' nobody to be a mother to 'm."

" We'd better ha' sent for Dinah, if we'd known where she
is," said Mr. Poyser ; " but Adam said she'd left no direction
where she'd be at Leeds."

" Why, she'd be wi' that woman as was a friend to her
Aunt Mary," said Mrs. Poyser, comforted a little by this sug-
gestion of her husband's. " I've often heard Dinah talk of
her, but I can't remember what name she called her by. But
there's Seth Bede ; he's like enough to know, for she's a
preaching woman as the Methodists think a deal on."

" I'll send to Seth," said Mr. Poyser. " I'll send Alick to
tell him to come, or else to send us word o' the woman's name,
an' thee can'st write a letter ready to send off to Treddles'on
as soon as we can make out a direction."

" It's poor work writing letters when you want folks to
come to you i' trouble," said Mrs. Poyser. "Happen it'll be
ever so long on the road, an' never reach her at last."

Before Alick arrived with the message, Lisbeth's thoughts
too had already flown to Dinah, and she had said to Seth.

" Eh ! there's no comfort for us i' this world any more,
wi'out thee couldst get Dinah Morris to come to us, as she did
when my old man died. I'd like her to come in an' take me
by the hand again, an' talk to me ; she'd tell me the rights
on't belike — she'd happen to know some good i' all this trouble
an' heartbreak comin' upo' that poor lad, as ne'er done a bit
o' wrong in's life, but war better nor anybody else's son, pick
the country round. Eh ! my lad .... Adam, my poor
lad ! "

" Thee wouldstna like me to leave thee, to go and fetch
Dinah ? " said Seth, as his mother sobbed, and rocked herself
to and fro.

" Fetch her ? " said Lisbeth, looking up, and pausing from
her grief, like a crying child who hears some promise of con-
solation. " Why, what place is't she's at, do they say ? "

" It's a good way off, mother — Leeds, a big town. But I
could be back in three days, if thee couldst spare me."

ADAM BEDE.

375

.t, "^.Y' "^y', I canna spare thee. Thee must go an' see
thy brother an bring me word what he's a-doin\ Mester
Irwine said he d come and tell me, but I canna make out
so well what it means when he tells me. Thee must go thysen
sin Adam wonna let me go to 'm. Write a letter To Dinah
the"e "^ ' ^"""^ ^"°"^"' °' "^"^^"S when nobody wants

c „"^''!!T';°T^,f"'^ ^"^^'^ 'h^'d be i'that big town," said
betli. If I d gone myself, I could ha' found out by askino
the members o' the society. But perhaps, if I put Sarah
Wil lamson, Methodist preacher, Leeds, o' th' outside it
might get to her, for most like she'd be wi' Sarah William.
son.

AT ^"^^^ ""^""^ """^ '''^^^ ^''^ message, and Seth, finding that
Mrs. Poyser was writing to Dinah, gave up the intention ol
wrung himself ; but he went to the Hall Farm to tell them
all he could suggest about the address of the letter, and warn
them that there might be some delay in the delivery, from
his not knowing an exact direction.

On leaving Lisbeth Mr. Irwine had gone to Jonathan
ISurge, who had also a claim to be acquainted with what was
likely to keep Adam away from business for some time •
and before six o clock that evening there were few people
in Broxton and Hayslope who had not heard the sad news
Mr. Irwine had not mentioned Arthur's name to Burge, and
yet the story of his conduct toward Hetty, with all the dark
shadows cast upon It by its terrible consequences, was present-
ly as well known as that his grandfather was dead ^and he
was come mto the estate. For Martin Poyser felt n; motive
to keep silence toward the one or two neighbors who ven^
tured to come and shake him sorro^vfully bfthe hand on the
first day of his trouble; and Carrol, who kept his ears onen
to all that passed at the Rectory, had framed an fnferendaT
version of the story, and found early opportunities of commu
nicating it.

One of those neighbors who came to Martin Poyser and
shook him by the hand without speaking for some minutes
was Bartle Massey. He had shut up his school, and was on
his way to the Rectory, where he arrived about half past seven
in the evening, and, sending his duty to Mr. Irwine be-^ed
pardon for troubling him at that hour, but he had something
particular on his mind. He was shown into the study wherl
Mr. Irwine soon joined him. '' """"'^

"Well, Bartle? "said Mr. Ir:^ine, putting out his hand.

276 ADAM BEDE.

That was not his usual way of saluting the schoolmaster, but
trouble makes us treat all who feel with us very much alike.
" Sit down."

" You know what I'm come about as well as I do, sir, I
dare say," said Bartle.

" You wish to know the truth about the sad news that has
reached you .... about Hetty Sorrel ? "

" Nay, sir, what I wish to know is about Adam Eede. I
understand you left him at Stoniton, and I beg the favor of
you to tell me W'hat's the state of the poor lad's mind, and
what he means to do. For, as for that bit o' pink-and-white
they've taken the trouble to put in jail, I don't value her a
rotten nut — not a rotten nut — only for the harm or good that
may come out other to an honest man — a lad I've set such store
by — trusted to that he'd make my bit o' knowledge go a good

way in the world Why, sir, he's the only scholar I've

had in this stupid country that ever had the will or the head-
piece for mathematics. If he hadn't had so much hard-work
to do, poor fellow, he might have gone into the higher
branches, and then this might never have happened — might
never have happened."

Bartle was heated by the exertion of walking fast in an agi'
tated frame of mind, and was not able to check himself on this
first occasion of venting his feelings. But he paused now to
rub his moist forehead, and probably his moist eyes also.

" You'll excuse me, sir," he said, when this pause had given
him time to reflect, " for running on in this way about my own
feelings, like that foolish dog of mine, howling in a storm,
when there's nobody wants to listen to me. I came to hear
you speak, not to talk myself, if you'll take the trouble to tell
me what the poor lad's doing."

" Don't put yourself under any restraint, Bartle," said Mr.
Irwine. "The fact is, I'm very much in the same condition
as vou just now ; I've a great deal that's painful on my mind,
and I find it hard work to be quite silent about my own feel-
ings, and only attend to others. I share your concern for
Adam, though he is not the only one whose sufferings I care
for in this afTair. He intends to remain at Stoniton till after
the trial : it will come on probably a week to-morrow. He
has taken a room there, and I encouraged him to do so, because
I think it better he should be away from his own home at
present ; and, poor fellow, he still believes Hetty is innocent
—he wants to summon up courage to see her if he can ; he
is unwilling to leave the spot where she is."

ADAM BEDS. 377

" Do you think the creatur's guilty, then ? " said Bartle.
" Do you think they'll hang her ? "

" I'm afraid it will go hard with her ; the evidence is very
strong. And one bad symptom is that she denies everything
—denies that she has had a <^^'^^^, m the face of the most posi-
tive evidpr>'"'>- I saw her myself, and she was obstinately si-
lent to me ; she shrank up like a frightened animal when she
saw me. I was never so shocked in my life as at the change
in her. But I trust that, in the worst case, we may obtain a
pardon for the sake of the innocent who are involved."

" Stuff and nonsense ! " said Bartle forgetting in his irrita-
tion to whom he was speaking — " I beg your pardon, sir, I
mean it's stuff and nonsense for the innocent to care about her
being hanged. For my own part, I think the sooner such
women are put out of the world the better ; and the men that
help 'em to do mischief had better go along with 'em for
that matter. What good will you do by keeping such vermin
alive, eating the victual that 'ud feed rational beings ? But if
Adam's fool enough to care about it, I don't want him to suffer

more than's needful Is he very much cut up, poor

fellow?" Bartle added, taking out his spectacles and putting
them on, as if they would assist his imagination.

" Yes, I'm afraid theg rief cuts very deep," said Mr. Irwine.
" He looks terribly shattered, and a certain violence came
over him now and then yesterday, which made me wish I
could have remained near him. But I shall go to Stoniton
again to-morrow, and I have confidence enough in the
strength of Adam's principle to trust that he will be able to
endure the worst vvilho it being driven to anything rash.

Mr. Irwine, who was involuntarily uttering his own thoughts
rather than addressing Bartle Massey in the last sentence, had
in his mind the possibihty that the spirit of vengeance toward
Arthur, which was the form Adam's anguish was continually
taking, might make him seek an encounter that was likely to
end more fatally than the one in the Grove. This possibility
heightened the anxiety with which he looked forward to Ar-
thur's arrival. But Bartle thought Mr. Irwine was referring
to suicide, and his face wore a new alarm.

" I'll tell you what I have in my head, sir," he said, " and
I hope you'll approve of it. I'm going to shut up my school ;
if the scholars come, they must go back again, that's all ; and
I shall go to Stoniton and look after Adam till this business
is over. I'll pretend I'm come to look on at the assizes; he
can't object to that. What do you think about it, sir? "

378 ADAM BEDE.

" Well, said Mr. Irwine, rather hesitatingly, " there would

be some real advantages in that and I honor you for

your friendship toward him, Bartle. But .... you must be
careful what you =ay to him, you know. I'm afraid you have
too little fellow-feeling m what you consider his weakness
about Hetty."

" Trust to me, sir — trust to me. I know what yuu .r^o^^.
I've been a fool myself in my time, but that's between you and
me. I sha'n't thrust myself on him — only keep my eye on
him, and see that he gets some good food, and put in a word
here and there."

" Then," said Mr. Irwine, reassured a little as to Bartle's
discretion, " I think you'll be doing a good deed, and it will
be well for you to let Adam's mother and brother know that
you're going."

" Yes, sir — yes," said Bartle, rising, and taking ofi his
spectacles, " I'll do that — I'll do that ; though the mother's a
whimpering thing — I don't like to come within ear-shot of
her ; however, she's a straight-backed, clean woman — none of
your slatterns. I wish you good-by, sir, and thank you for the
time you've spared me. You're everybody's friend in this
business — everybody's friend. It's a heavy weight you've got
on your shoulders."

" Good-by, Bartle, till we meet at Stoniton, as I dare say
we shall."

Bartle hurried away from the Rectory, evading Carrol's
conversational advances, and saying, in an exasperated tone,
to Vixen, whose short legs pattered beside him on the
gravel,

'' Now, I shall be obliged to take you with me, you good-
for-nothing woman. You'd go fretting yourself to death if I
left you ; you know you would, and perhaps get snapped up
by some tramp ; and you'll be running into bad company, I
expect, putting your nose in every hole and corner where
you've no business ; but if you do anything disgraceful I'll
disown you — mind that, madam — mind that ! "

ADAM BEDE

379

CHAPTER XLI.

THE EVE OF THE TRIAL.

. An upper room in a dull Stonitor streef u.J*h f u j •
It-one /aid on m^ floor. It is ten oV^loHfn ^} ^^'^ ^^^' '"
and the dark wall opposite he win Hn, ^^"''^^>' "^g^^'
light that might havf struL ed th tlTe li^h^ T'/'^ "^°°"--
candle by whtch Bartle M^^^^pvI . ^ °^'^ °^ ^^'« o"e dip

is really'looking o e ' h s'spe'ctacl^f ^ '° "t?'.' "'^^^ ^'
near the dark wTndow 'P^^^^^^^s at Adam Bede, seated

fas J4"L'^ds:. ^1? >Si?Sj *'"=' ''^="'> ^'^ ™-

o^^--/s ' v^ -" -«""s> "sir.

background remaining, sat on the bed in the

" YerAdam'T„!;^'';,''T T^ ^''™> t«n,nlousIv.
this evenint •?" ' ' ""'' ""^^^aplatn have both been wi'th her

^^;;pid you ask her, sir . . . . did you say anything about

" '^T'l-f'^ ^'- f ™'"«' "'* some hesitation "I snoke nf
^.^^I,satd you wtshed to see her before the tri'al, 1^X0000!

you
sented."

3«o ADAM BEDE.

As Mr. Irwine paused, Adam looked at him with eager,
questioning eyes.

" You know she shrinks from seeing any one, Adam. It is
not only 3'ou — some fatal influence seems to have shut up her
heart against her fellow-creatures. She has scarcely said any-
thing more than 'No,' either to me or the chaplain. Three
or four days ago, before you were mentioned to her, when I
asked her if there was any one of her family whom she would
like to see — to whom she could open her mind, she said, with
a violent shudder, ' Tell them not to come near me — I won't
see any of them.' "

Adam's head was hanging down again, and he did not
speak. There was silence for a few minutes, and then Mr.
Irvv^ine said,

" I don't like to advise you against your own feelings,
Adam, if they now urge you strongly to go and see her to-
morrow morning, even without her consent. It is just pos-
sible, notwithstanding appearances to the contrary, that the
interview might affect her favorably. But I grieve to say I
have scarcely any hope of that. She didn't seem agitated
when I mentioned your name ; she only said ' No,' in the
same cold, obstinate way as usual. And if the meeting had
no good effect on her, it would be pure, useless suffering to
you — severe suffering, I fear. She is very much changed "...

Adam started up from his chair, and seized his hat which
lay on the table. But he stood still then, and looked at Mr.
Irwine, as if he had a question to ask, which it was yet diffi-
cult to utter. Bartle Massey rose quietly, turned the key in
the door, and put it in his pocket.

" Is he come back ? " said Adam at last.

" No, he is not," said Mr. Irwine, quietly, " Lay down
your hat, Adam, unless you would like to walk out with me
for a little fresh air, I fear you have not been out ao-ain to-
day."

" You needn't deceive me, sir," said Adam, looking hard
at Mr. Irwine, and speaking in a tone of angry suspicion.
" You needn't be afraid of me. I only want justice. I want
him to feel what she feels. It's his work. . , she was a child
as it 'ud ha' gone t'anybody's heart to look at . . .1 don't
care what she's done. . . it was him brought her to it. And
he shall know it. . . he shall feel it. . . if there's a just God, he
shall feel what it is t' ha' brought a child like her to sin and
misery ". . .

" I'm not deceiving you, Adam," said Mr, Irwine ; " Ar*

ADAM bEDE.

He has a heart and a conscience I ca^th'.^^ and bitterly,
in his character. I am com Seed T.r^ ^"^felj deceived

of tortur^that ,-ou could inflict on 1^1^ J^ ^^
chair tin ■ '^ th^l is^t^^l --^j"^ ^ ^1^

the prettiest hVn:^ 'that God wf ^' T '"'r^ ^^">- ^S^^"- ' '
I thought she lov^e?^^e^:^^'nlvTst7d -^'^"^^ "^ " "^^ " ' '

derttt'tTftt' e'rifMr'^' r^^"^^"^"^° ^ ^— un-
said ab;upt];^i;\^^^,°;;irs ^^ '^"^^^^^ ^"^ "- ^^

sheis."r?%;^::3:^Cl-,;'-^sayP You don't think

Mr. I^^^S^ISX' '^r -^^^ --->•• Adam/'
form our judgment on what seem. / '^ ''^'^' "'^ sometimes
yet, for want of knouW som^ '° " V''^"- ^^''^'^"^^- and
wrong. But sut^pose ie^vor^■ T'V"''^ °"^ -^'"^^"^^"^ ^"^
that the guilt of her cr me hes with^hL '^ T ''-^' ^° '^V
bear the punishment. Tt i not or ' '"^ '''"' ^" °"^ht to
shares of moral guilt and retrn^nn' T.?"/*" apportion the
to avoid mistakes even in dl . ^•°"- ^Y^ ^"^ '^ impossible
single criminal act and JheTroMr"^'^? has committed a
held responsible for the unfo?e° i ^""'^ ^^' " "^^" '^ to be
deed, is one that miUt weH T i ^°"^^2""""^^ ^^ his own
The evil consequences hi m. r^ViT^'" ^^ ^^^^ into it.
selfish indulgence ,?^ Xl J ^'^ ^^'^^^ ^" ^ si"?Ie act of
to awaken some fee nt less gr. "" "^"^ ^^^^ ''' °".^ht sure^v
to punish. You have a' m nd'th^tT'"'"'/^'" ^ ^^^'^ ^^^^'>-
Adam, when you are calm Do I ""derstand this fully.
the anguish that dH res you i^to tH-"PP°'" ^ """'^ ^"t^'" '"to

tred ; but think of th?s : 'i? you w " tf oK "' ""^"^^^^"^ ^-
. ii you were to obey your passion^

382 ADAM BEDS.

for it is passion, and you deceive yourself in calling it justice
— it might be with you precisely as it has been with Arthur ;
nay, worse ; your passion might lead you yourself into a hor-
rible crime."

"No — not worse," said Adam, bitterly; " I don't believe
it's worse — I'd sooner do it — I'd sooner do a wickedness as
I could suffer for myself, than ha' brought ker to do wicked-
ness and then stand by and see 'em punish her while they let
me alone ; and all for a bit o' pleasure, as, if he'd had a man's
heart in him, he'd ha' cut his hand off sooner than he'd ha'
taken it. What if he didn't foresee what's happened ? He
feresaw enough ; he'd no right t' expect anything but harm
and shame to her. And then he wanted to smooth it off
wi' lies. No — there's plenty o' things folks are hanged for,
not half so hateful as that ; let a man do what he will, if he
knows he's to bear the punishment himself, he isn't half so
bad as a mean selfish coward as makes things easy t' him-
self, and knows all the w^hile the punishment 'ull fall on some-
body else."

" There again you partly deceive yourself, Adam. There
is no sort of wrong deed of which a man can bear the punish-
ment alone ; you can't isolate yourself, and say that the evil
which is in you shall not spread. Men's lives are as thor-
oughly blended with each other as the air they breathe ; evil
spreads as necessarily as disease. I know, I feel the terrible
extent of suffering this sin of Arthur's has caused to others ;
but so does every sin cause suffering to others besides those
who commit it. An act of vengeance on your part against
Arthur would simply be another evil added to those we are
suffering under ; you could not bear the punishment alone ;
you would entail the worst sorrows on every one who loves
you. You would have committed an act of blind fury, that
would leave all the present evils just as they were, and add
worse evils to them. You may tell me that you meditate
no fatal act of vengeance ; but the feeling in 3'Our mind is
what gives birth to'such actions, and as long as you indulge
it. as long as you do not see that to fix your mind on Arthur's
punishment is revenge, and not justice, you are in danger of
being led on to the commission of some great wrong. Re-
member what you told me about your feelings after you had
given that blow to Arthur in the Grove."

Adam was silent ; the last words had called up a vivid
image of the past, and Mr. Irwine left him to his thoughts,
while he spoke to Bartle Massey about old Mr. Donnithorne's

ADAM BEDE. -g?

funeral and other matters of an indifferent kind. But at length
Adam turned round and said in a more subdued tone,

" I've not asked about 'em at th' Hall Farm, sir. ' Is Mr.
Poyser coming ? "

" He is come ; he is in Stoniton to-night. But I could not
advise him to see you, Adam. His own mind is in a very per-
turbed state, and it is best he should not see you till you are
calmer."

" Is Dinah Morris come to 'em, sir ? Seth said they'd sent
for her."

" No. Mr. Poyser tells me she was not come when he left.
They are afraid the letter has not reached her. It seems they
had no exact address."

Adam sat ruminating a little while, and then said,

"I wonder if Dinah 'ud ha' gone to see her. But perhaps
the Poysers would ha' been sorely against it, since they won't
come nigh her themselves. But I think she would for the
Methodists are great folks for going into the prisons : and
Seth said he thought she would. She'd a very tender way
with her, Dinah had ; I wonder if she could ha' done any
good. You never saw her, sir, did you ? "

" Yes, I did ; I had a conversation with her — she pleased
me a good deal. And now you mention it, I wish she would
come ; for it is possible that a gentle, mild woman like her
might mov^ Hetty to open her heart. The jail chaplain is
rather harsh in his manner."

"' ?f" tJ? °' "° "^^ ^^ ^^^^ doesn't come," said Adam, sadly,
if I d thought of it earlier, I would have taken some
measure tor finding her out," said Mr. Irwine, "but it's too
late now, I fear . . . Well, Adam, I must go now. Try to get
some rest to-night. God bless you. I'll see you early to-
morrow morning." ^

CHAPTER XLII.

THE MORNING OF THE TRIAL.

At one o'clock the next day, Adam was alone in his dull
upper room ; his watch lay before him on the table, as if he
were counting the long minutes. He had no knowledge of

384

ADAM BEDE.

what was likely to be said by the witnesses on the trial, for he
had shrunk from all the particulars connected with Hetty's
arrest and accusation. This brave active man, who would
have hastened toward any danger or toil to rescue Hetty from
an apprehended wrong or misfortune, felt himself powerless
to contemplate irremediable evil and suffering. The suscepti-
bility which would have been an impelling force where there
was any possibility of action, became helpless anguish when
he was obliged to be passive ; or else sought an active outlet
in the thought of inflicting justice on Arthur. Energetic
natures, strong for all strenuous deeds, will often rush away
from a hopeless sufferer, as if they were hard-hearted. It is
the over-mastering sense of pain that drives them. They
shrink by an ungovernable instinct, as they would shrink from
laceration. Adam had brought himself to think of seeing
Hetty, if she would consent to see him, because he thought
the meeting might possibly be a good to her — might help to
melt away this terrible hardness they told him of. If she saw
he bore her no ill-will for what she had done to him, she might
open her heart to him. But this resolution had been an im-
mense effort ; he trembled at the thought of seeing her changed
face, as a timid woman trembles at the thought of the surgeon's
knife ; and he chose now to bear the long hours of suspense,
rather than encounter what seemed to him the more intoler-
able agony of witnessing her trial.

Deep, unspeakable sufifering may well be called a baptism,
a regeneration, the initiation into a new state. The yearning
memories, the bitter regret, the agonized sympathy, the strug-
gling appeals to the Invisible Right — all the intense emotions
which had filled the days and nights of the past week, and
were compressing themselves again like an eager crowd into
the hours of this single morning, made Adam look back on
all the previous years as if they had been a dim, sleepy, ex-
istence, and he had only now awaked to full consciousness.
It seemed to him as if he had always before thought it a light
thing that men should suffer ; as if all that he had himself
endured, and called sorrow before, was only a moment's stroke
that had never left a bruise. Doubtless a great anguish may
do the work of years, and we may come out from that baptism
of fire with a soul full of new awe and pity.

" O God ! " Adam groaned, as he leaned on the table, and
looked blankly at the face of the watch, " and men have suf'
fered like this before . . and poor helpless young things,hav6
suffered like her . . . Such a little while ago, looking so happy

ADAM BEDE.

385

ana so pretty . . . kissing 'em all, her grandfather and all of
'em, and they wishing her luck. . . , Oh, my poor, poor Hetty
. . . dost think on it now ? "

Adam started and looked round toward the door. Vixen
had begun to whimper, and there was the sound of a stick
and a lame walk on the stairs. It was Bartle Massey come
back. Could it be all over?

Bartle entered quickly, and, going up to Adam, grasped
his hand, and said, " I'm just come to look at you, my boy,
for the folks are gone out of court for a bit."

Adam's heart beat so violently, he was unable to speak —
he could only return the pressure of his friend's hand ; and
Bartle, drawing up the other chair, came and sat in front of
him, taking off his hat and his spectacles.

" That's a thing never happened to me before," he ob^
served—" to go out o' doors with my spectacles on. I clean
forgot to take 'em off."

The old man made this trivial remark, thinking it better
not to respond at all to Adam's agitation ; he would gather,
in an indirect way, that there was nothing decisive to com-
municate at present.

I' And now," he said, rising again, " I must see to your
having a bit of the loaf, and some of that wine Mr. Irwine
sent this morning. He'll be angry with me if you don't have
it. Come now," he went on, bringing forward the bottle and
the loaf, and pouring some wine into a cup, " I must have a
bit and a sup myself. Drink a drop with me, my lad — drink
with me."

Adam pushed the cup gently away, and said, entreatingly,
"Tell me about it, Mr. Massey— tell me all about it. Was
she there ? Have they begun ? "

" Yes, my boy, yes— it's taken all the time since I first
went ; but they're slow, they're slow ; and there's the counsel
they've got for her puts a spoke in the wheel whenever he can,
and makes a deal to do with cross-examining the witnesses'
and quarrelling with the other lawyers. That's all he can do
for the money they give him ; and it's a big sum — it's a big
sum. But he's a cute fellow, with an eye that 'ud pick the
needles out of the hay in no time. If a man had got no feel-
ings, it 'ud be as good as a demonstration to listen to what
goes on in court ; but a tender heart makes one stupid. I'd
have given up figures forever only to have had some good news
to bring to you, my poor lad."

"^ Bqt does it seem to be going against her ? " said Adam,

386

ADAM BEDE.

" Tell me what they've said. I must know it now — must
know what they have to bring against her."

" Why, tlie chief evidence yet has been the doctors ; all
but Martin Poyser — poor Martin ! Ever3'body in court felt
for him — it was like one sob, the sound they made when he
came down again. The worse was, when they told him to
look at the prisoner at the bar. It was hard work, poor
fellow — it was hard work. Adam, my boy, the blow falls
heavily on him as well as you ; you must help poor Martin ;
you must show courage. Drink some wine now, and show
me you mean to bear it like a man."

Bartle had made the right sort of appeal. Adam, with an
air of quiet obedience, took up the cup and drank a little.

"Tell me how she looked ? " he said presently.

" Frightened, very frightened, when they first brought her
in ; it was the first sight of the crowd and the judge, poor
creature. And there's a lot o' foolish women in fine clothes,
with gewgaws all up their arms, and feathers on their heads,
sitting near the judge : they've dressed themselves out in that
way, one 'ud think, to be scarecrows and warnings against
any man ever meddling with a woman again ; they put up
their glasses, and stared and whispered. But after that she
stood like a white image, staring down at her hands, and
seeming neither to hear nor see anything. And she's as white
as a sheet. She didn't speak when they asked her if she'd
plead ' guilty ' or ' not guilty,' and they pled ' not guilty' for
her. But when she heard her uncle's name, there seemed to
go a shiver right through her ; and when they told him to look
at her, she hung her head down and cowered, and hid her
face in her hands. He'd much ado to speak, poor man, his
voice trembled so. And the counsellors — who look as hard as
nails mostly — I saw, spared him as much as they could. Mr.
Irwine put himself near him, and went with him out o' court.
Ah ! it's a great thing in a man's life to be able to stand by a
neighbor, and uphold him in such trouble as that."

" God bless him and you too, Mr. Massey," said Adam, in
a low voice, laying his hand on Bartle's arm.

" Ay, ay, he's good metal ; he gives the right ring when
you try him, our parson does. A man o' sense — says no more
than's needful. He's not one of those that think they can
comfort you with chattering, as if folks who stand by and look
on knew a deal better what the trouble was than those who
have to bear it. I've had to do with such folks in my time —
in the South, when I was in trouble myself, Mr. Irwine is t©

ADAM BEDE. 387

be a witness himself, by and by, on her side, you know, to
speak to her character and bringing up."

" But the other evidence . . . does it go heard against her ? "
said Adam. " What do you think, Mr. Massey ? Tell me the
truth."

" Yes, my lad, yes : the truth is the best thing to tell. It
must come at last. The doctors' evidence is heavy on her —
is heavy. But she's gone on denying she's had a child from
first to last : these poor silly woman-things — they've not the
sense to know it's no use denying what's proved. It'll make
against her with the jur}', I doubt, her being so obstinate :
they may be less for recommending her to mercy, if the ver-
dict's against her. But Mr. Irwine '11 leave no stone unturned
with the judge — you may rely upon that, Adam."

" Is there nobody to stand by her, and seem to care for her,
in the court ? " said Adam.

" There's the chaplain o' the jail sits near her, but he's a
sharp ferrety-faced man — another sort o' flesh and blood to
Mr. Irwine. They say the jail chaplains are mostly the fag-
end 0' the clergy."

" There's one man as ought to be there," said Adam bit-
terly. Presently he drew himself up, and looked fixedly out of
the window, apparently turning over some new idea in his
mind.

" Mr. Massey," he said at last, pushing the hair off his fore-
head, " I'll go gack with you. I'll go into court. It's cowardly
of me to keep away. I'll stand by her — I'll own her — for
iW she's been deceitful. They oughtn't to cast her off — her
own flesh and blood. We hand folks over to God's mercy, and
show none ourselves. I used to be hard sometimes : ['11
never be hard again. I'll go, Mr. Massey — I'll go with you."

There was a decision in Adam's manner which would
have prevented Bartle from opposing him, even if he had
wished to do so. He only said,

" Take a bit, then, and another sup, Adam, for the love
of me. See, I must stop and eat a morsel. Now you take
some."

Nerved by an active resolution, Adam took a morsel of
bread, and drank some wine. He was haggard and unshaven.
as he had been yesterday, but he stood upright again, and
looked more like the Adam Bede of former days.

388 ADAM SEDE.

[AFTER XLIII.

THE VERDICT,

The place fitted up that day as a court of justice was a
grand old hall, now destroyed by fire. The midday light that
fell on the close pavement of human heads, was shed through
a line of high pointed windows, variegated with the mellow
tints of old painted glass. Grim dusty armor hung in high
relief in front of the dark oaken gallery at the farther end ;
and under the broad arch of the great mullioned window
opposite was spread a curtain of old tapestry, covered with
dim melancholy figures, like a dozing indistinct dream of the
past. It was a place that through the rest of the year was
haunted with the shadowy memories of old kings and queens,
unhappy, discrowned, imprisoned ; but to-day all those shad-
ows had fled, and not a soul in the vast hall felt the pres-
ence of any but a living sorrow, which was quivering in warm
hearts.

But that sorrow seemed to have made itself feebly felt
hitherto, now when Adam Bede's tall figure was suddenly
seen, being ushered to the side of the prisoner's dock. In
the broad sunlight of the great hall, among the sleek shaven
faces of other men, the marks of suffering in his face were
startling even to Mr. Irwine, who had last seen him in the dim
light of his small room ; and the neighbors from Hayslope
who were present, and who told Hetty Sorrel's story by their
firesides in their old age, never forgot to say how it moved
them when Adam Bede, poor fellow, taller by the head than
most of the people round him, came into court, and took his
place by her side.

But Hetty did not see him. She was standing in the
same position Bartle Massey had described, her hands crossed
over each other, and her eyes fixed on them. Adam had
not dared to look at her in the first moments, but at last,
when the attention of the court was withdrawn by the pro-
ceedings, he turned his face toward her with a resolution not
to shrink.

Why did they say she was so changed ? In the corpse we
love, it is the likeness we see — it is the likeness, which makes
itself felt the more keenly because something else was, and is
not. There they were — the sweet face and neck, with the dark

ADAM BEDE -go

tendrils of hair, the long dark lashes, the rounded cheek and
the pouting lips ; pale and thin — yes — but like Hetty, and
only Hetty. _ Others thought she looked as if some demon
had cast a blighting glance upon her, withered up the woman's
soul in her, and left only a hard despairing obstinacy. But
the mother's yearning, that completest type of the life in an-
other life which is the essence of real human love, feels the
presence of the cherished child even in the debased, degraded
mm ; and to Adam, this pale, hard-looking culprit was the
Hetty who had smiled at him in the garden under the apple-
tree boughs — she was that Hetty's corpse, which he had trem-
bled to look at the first time, and then was unwilling to turn
away his eyes from.

But presently he heard something that compelled him to
listen, and made the sense of sight less absorbing. A woman
was in the witness-box, a middle-aged woman, who spoke in a
firm distinct voice. She said,

" My name is Sarah Stone. I am a widow, and keep a
small shop licensed to sell tobacco, snuff, and tea, in Church
Lane, Stoniton, The prisoner at the bar is the same young
woman who came, looking ill and tired, with a basket on her
arm, and asked for a lodging at my house on Saturday even-
ing, the 27th of February. She had taken the house for a
public, because there was a figure against the door. And
when I said I didn't take in lodgers, the prisoner began to
cry, and said she was too tired to go anywhere else, and she
only wanted a bed for one night. And her prettiness, and
her condition, and something respectable about her clothes
and looks, and the trouble she seemed to be in, made me as
I couldn't find in my heart to send her away at once. I asked
her to sit down, and gave her some tea, and asked her where
she was going, and where her friends were. She said she was
going home to her friends ; they were farming folks a good
way off. and she'd had a long journey that had cost her more
money than she expected, so as she'd hardly any money left
in her pocket, and was afraid of going where it would cost her
much. She had been obliged to sell most of the things out
of her basket, but she'd thankfully give a shilling for a" bed.
I saw no_ reason why I shouldn't" take the young woman in
for the night. I had only one room, but there were two beds
in it, and I told her she might stay with me. I thought she'd
been led wrong and got into trouble, but if she was going to
her tnends, it would be a good work to keep her out of
farther harm."

390

ADAM BEDE.

The witness then stated that in the night a child was born,
and she identified the baby-clothes then shown to herastbosfl
in which she had herself dressed the child.

" These are the clothes. I made them myself, and had
kept them by me ever since my last child was born, I took
a deal of trouble both for the child and the mother. I couldn't
help taking to the little thing and being anxious about it. I
didn't send for a doctor, for there seemed no need. I told
the mother in the daytime she must tell me the name of her
friends, and where they lived, and let me write to them. She
said, by and by she would write herself, but not to-day. She
would have no nay, but she would get up and be dressed, in
spite of everything I could say. She said she felt quite strong
enough, and it was wonderful what spirit she showed. But I
wasn't quite easy what I should do about her, and towards
evening I made up my mind I'd go, after meeting was over,
and speak to our minister about it. I left the house about
half-past eight o'clock. I didn't go out at the shop door, but
at the back door, which opens into a narrow alley. I've only
got the ground floor of the house, and the kitchen and the
bedroom both look into the alley. I left the prisoner sitting
up by the fire in the kitchen with the baby on her lap. She
hadn't cried or seemed low at all, as she did the night before.
I thought she had a strange look with her eyes, and she got
a bit flushed toward evening. I was afraid of the fever, and I
thought I'd call and ask an acquaintance of mine, an experi-
enced woman, to come back with me when I went out. It
was a very dark night. I didn't fasten the door behind me ;
there was no lock ; it was a latch with a bolt inside, and when
there was nobody in the house I always went out at the shop
door. But I thought there was no danger in leaving it un-
fastened that little while. I was longer than I meant to be,
for I had to wait for the woman that came back with me. It
was an hour and a half before we got back, and when we
went in, the candle was burning just as I left it, but the
prisoner and the baby were both gone. She'd taken her
cloak and bonnet, but she'd left tlie basket and the things in it.
... I was dreadful frightened, and angry with her for going.
I didn't go to give information, because I'd no thought she
meant to do any harm, and I knew she had money in her
pocket to buy food and lodging. I didn't like to set the con-
stable after her, for she'd a right to go from me if she liked."

The effect of this evidence on Adam was electrical ; it
gave him new force. Hetty could not be guility of the crime

ADA AT BEDE.

-her heart must have clung to her baby— else why should
she have taken ,t with her ? She might have left it behind,
i he little creature had died naturally, and then she had hid-
den It ; babies were so liable to death— and there mio-lu be
the strongestsuspicions without any proof of guilt. His mind
was so occupied with imaginary arguments against such sus-
picions, that he could not listen to the cross-^examination by
HeUy s counsel, who tried without result, to elicit evidence
that the prisoner had shown some movements of maternal
affection toward the child. The whole time this witness was
bemg examined, Hetty had stood as motionless as before • no
word seemed to arrest her ear. But the sound of the next
witness s voice touched a chord that was still sensitive • she
gave a start and a frightened look towards him, but immedi-
ately tunied away her head and looked down at her hands as
'-;, ^^"' '':'^^^^' '^'^s a man, a rough peasant. He said •
T ^/^V?"'^ '' J°M " ^^"^^"^^ ^ ^"^ a laborer, and live at
I .n i"' '''V^'^^^ °"^°f Stoniton. A week last Mon-
day tow-ard one o'clock in the afternoon, I was goina toward
Hetton Coppice, and about a quarter of a mile fromihe con-
pice I saw the prisoner, in a red cloak, sitting under a bit of
a haystack not far off the stile. She got up wten she saw me
and seemed as if she'd be walking on the other way. It was
a regular road through the fields, and nothing verj- uncommon
to see a young woman there, but I took notice of her because
she looked white and scared. I should have thou-ht she
was a beggar woman only for her good clothes. I Thought
she looked a bit crazy, but it was no business of mine "^ I
stood and looked back after her. but she went right on while
she was in sight. I had to go to the other side of the coppice
to look after some stakes. There's a road right throucrh it
and bits of openings here and there, where the trees liave
been cut down, and some of 'em not carried away I didn't
go straight along the road, but turned off toward the middle
and took a shorter way toward the spot I wanted to get to'
1 hadn t got far out of the road into one of the open places"
before ; heard a strange cry. I thought it didn't come from'
any animal I knew, but I wasn't for stopping to look about
just then. But it went on, and seemed so strange to me in
that place, I couldn't help stopping to look. I began to think
1 might make some money of it, if it was a new thing. But
Id hark work to tell which way it came from, and for a good
while I kept looking up at tliC boughs. And then I thought
It came from the ground ; and there was a lot of timber-chop-

2Q2 ADAM BEDE.

pings lying about, and loose pieces of turf, and a trunk or
two. And 1 looked about among them, but at last the cry
stopped. So I was for giving it up, and went on about my
business. But when I came back the same way pretty nigh
an hour after, I couldn't help laying down my stakes to have
another look. And just as 1 was stooping and laying down
the stakes, I saw something odd and round and whitish lying
on the ground under a nut-bush by the side of me. And I
stooped down on hands and knees to pick it up. And I saw
it was a little baby's hand."

At these words a thrill ran through the court. Hetty was
visibly trembling ; now, for the first time, she seemed to be
listening to what a witness said.

" There was a lot of timber-choppings put together just
where the ground went hollow, like, under the bush, and the
hand came out from among them. But there was a hole left
in one place, and I could see down it, and see the child's
head; and I made haste and did away the turf and the chop-
pings, and took out the child. It had got comfortable clothes
on, but its body was cold, and I thought it must be dead, I
made haste back with it out of the wood, and took it home
to my wife. She said it was dead, and I'd better take it to
the parish and tell the constable. And I said, ' I'll lay my
life it's that young woman's child as I met going to the cop-
pice.' But she seemed to be gone clean out of sight. And
I took the child on to Hetton parish and told the constable,
and we went on to Justice Hardy. And then we went looking
after the young woman till dark at night, and we went and
gave information at Stoniton as they might stop her. And
the next morning, another constable came to me, to go with
him to the spot where I found the child. And when we got
there, there was the prisoner a-sitting against the bush where
I found the child ; and she cried out when she saw us, bm
she never offered to move. She'd got a big piece of bread on
her lap."

Adam had given a faint groan of despair while this witness
was speaking. He had hidden his face on his arm, which
rested on the boarding in front of him. It was the supreme
moment of his suffering; Hetty was guilty; and he was
silently calling to God for help. He heard no more of the
evidence, and was unconscious when the case for tlie prosecu-
tion had closed — unconscious that Mr. Irwine was in the
witness-box, telling of Hetty's unblemished character in her
own parish, and of the virtuous habits in which she had been

ADAM BEDE

393

brought up. This testimony could have no influence on the
verdict but It was given as part of that plea for mercy
which her own counsel would have made if he had be^n al-
lowed to speak for her— a favor not granted to criminals in
those stern times.

At last Adam lifted up his head, for there was a general
movement round him. The judge had addressed the jury
and they were retiring. The decisive moment was not lA
oh. Adam felt a shuddering horror that would not let him
look at Hetty, but she had long relapsed into her blank hard
inditference. All eyes were strained to look at her, but she
stood like a statue of dull despair.

There was a mingled rustling, whispering, and low buzzing
throughout the court during this interval. The desire to
listen was suspended, and every one had some feelino- or
opinion to express in undertones. Adam sat looking blankly
before him, but he did not see the objects that were right in
tront of his eyes— the counsels and attorneys talking with an
air ot cool baseness, an'd Mr. Irwine in low, earnest conversa-
tion with the judge ; did not see Mr. Irwine sit down again
in agitation, and shake his head mournfully when somebody
whispered to him. The inward action was too intense for
Adam to take in outward objects, until some strong sensation
roused him. ^

It was not very long, hardly more than a quarter of an
hour before the knock which told that the jury had come to

tht nn7 '"'^'^'" ?^"'^ °f ^ ^'■^^t multitude: which tells
ilpn.. '°"' "^^Y^^ 1" them all. Deeper and deeper the
urvmen'f ""'"^ '° ''''°"\1' ^'}^ '^^ deepening night, while the
o hoM "if ""? ""T 'f '^ °^'^^' ^"^ the prisoner was made

'' Guiky^"' ' """^ '^' J"'^ ^^' ^'^^^ f°^ their verdict.

It was the verdict every one expected, but there was a si-h
of disappointment from some hearts, that it was followed by

was'nTwith'tr " '• ""^^- . ^'^' ^^^ '^^^-'"^y °f '^"--'
stood onfT' ^I'^'^'lTi *^^ """^turalness of her crime

Sandij"'f ^T^'^^>^.''^' ^'^" °f her hard immova-
bility and obstinate silence. Even the verdict, to distant eyes

her trelrng^"' ^° "°^^ '^^ ^ '^"^ *-^ ^^^ -- -ar L'^

The stillness was less intense until the iudge nut on his

h nd h^' ^t^f'.f^^^'^^ !;^ ""'' canonicals\vafob'"ervedbe!
nind him. Then it deepened again, before the crier had had

394 ADAM BEDS.

time to command silence. If any sound were heard, it must
have been the sound of beating hearts. U'he Judge spoke :

" Hester SorreL" ....

The blood rushed to Hetty's face, and then fled back again,
as she looked up at the judge, and kept her wide-open eyes
fixed on him, as if fascinated by fear. Adam had not yet
turned toward her • there was a deep horror, like a great gulf,
between them. But at the words— "and then to be hanged
by the neck till you be dead," a piercing shriek rang through
the hall. It was Hetty's shriek. Adam started to his feet and
stretched out his arms toward her ; but the arms could not
reach her ; she had fallen down in a fainting fit, and was car-
ried out of court.

CHAPTER XLIV.

ARTHUR' S RETURN.

When Arthur Donnithorne landed at Liverpool, and read
the letter from his aunt I^ydia, briefly announcing his grand-
father's death, his first feeling was, " Poor grandfather ! I wish
I could have got to him to be wi(h him when he died. He
might have felt or wished something at the last that I shall
never know now. It was a lonely death."

It is impossible to say that his grief was deeper than that.
Pity and softened memory took place of the old antagonism,
and in his busy thoughts about the future, as the chaise carried
him rapidly along toward the home where he was now to be
master, there was a continually recurring effort to remember
anything by which he could show a r gard for his grandfather's
wishes, without counteracting his own cherished aims for the
good of the tenants and the estate. But it is not in human
nature — only in human pretence — for a young man like Arthur,
with a fine constitution and fine spirits, thinking well of him-
self, believing that others think well of him, and having a very
ardent intention to give them more and more reason for that
good opinion — it is not possible for such a young man, just
coming into a splendid estate through the death of a very old
man whom he was not fond of, to feel anything very different
from exultant joy. Now his real life was beginning; now he

ADAM BEDE. ^o-

would have room and opportunity for acting, and he would use
them. He would show the Loamshire people what a fine
country gentleman was : he would not exchange that career
for any other under the sun. He felt himself riding over the
hills in the breezy autumn days, looking after favorite plans of
drainage and inclosure ; then admired on sombre mornings as
the best rider on the best horse in the hunt ; spoken well of on
market-days as a first-rate landlord ; by and by making speeches
at election dinners, and showing a wonderful knowledge of
agriculture ; the patron of new ploughs and drills, the severe
upbraider of negligent landowners, and withal a jolly fellow
that everybody must like — happy faces greeting him every-
where on his own estate, and the neighboring families on the
best terms with him. The Irwines should dine with him every
week, and have their own carriage to come in, for in some very
delicate way that Arthur would devise, the lay-impropriator of
the Hayslope tithes would insist on paying a couple of hun-
dreds more to the vicar ; and his aunt should be as confortable
as possible, and go on living at the Chase, if she liked, in spite
of her old-maidish ways— at least until he was married ; and
that even lay in the indistinct background, for Arthur had not
yet seen the v/oman who would play the lady-wife to the first-
rate country gentleman.

These were' Arthur's chief thoughts, so far as a man's
thoughts through hours of travelling can be compressed into
a few sentences, which are only like the list of names telling
you what are the scenes in a long, long panorama, full o1
color, of detail, and of life. The happy faces Arthur saw
greeting him were not pale abstractions, but real ruddy faces,
long familiar to him ; Martin Poyser was there— the whole
Poyser family.
What— Hetty ?

Yes ; for Arthur was at ease about Hetty : not quite at
ease about the past, for a certain burning of the ears would
come whenever he thought of the scenes with Adam last
August— but at ease about her present lot. Mr. Irwine, who
had been a regular correspondent, telling him all the 'news
aoout the old places and people, had sent him word nearly
three months ago that Adam Bede was not to marry Mary
Burge, as he had thought, but pretty Hetty Sorrel. Martin
1 oyser and Adam himself had both told Mr. Irwine all about
It— that Adam had been deeply in love with Hetty these two
years and that now it was agreed they were to be married in
March. The stalwart rogue Adam was more susceptible than

396 ADAM BEDB.

the rector had thought ; it was really quite an idyllic love*
affair ; and if it had not been too long to tell in a letter, he
would have liked to describe to Arthur the blushing looks
and the simple, strong words with which the fine, honest fel-
low told his secret. He knew Arthur would like to hear that
Adam had this sort of happiness in prospect.

Yes, indeed ! Arthur felt there was not air enough in the
room to satisfy his renovated life, when he had read that pas-
sage in the letter. He threw up the windows, he ruslied out
of doors into the December air, and greeted every one who
spoke to him with an eager gayety, as if there had been news
of a fresh Nelson victory. For the first time that day since he
had come to Windsor, he was in true boyish spirits ; the load
that had been pressing upon him was gone ; the haunting fear
had vanished. He thought he could conquer his bitterness
toward Adam now — could offer him his hand, and ask to be
his friend again, in spite of that painful memory which would
still make his ears burn. He had been knocked down, and he
had been forced to tell a he ; such things make a scar, do what
we will. But if Adam were the same again as in the old days,
Arthur wished to be the same too, and to have Adam mixed
up with his business and his future, as he had always desired
before that accursed meeting in August. Nay, he woukl do a
great deal more for Adam than he should otherwise have done,
when he came into the estate ; Hetty's husband had a special
claim on him — Hetty herself should feel that any pain she
had suffered through Arthur in the past was compensated to
her a hundred-fold. For really she could not have felt much,
since she had so soon made up her mind to marry Adam.

You perceive clearly what sort of picture Adam and Hetty
made in the panorama of Arthur's thoughts on his journey
homeward. It was !\Iarch now ; they were soon to be mar-
ried ; perhaps they were already married. And now it was
actually in his power to do a great deal for them. Sweet —
sweet little Hetty ! The little puss hadn't cared for him half
as much as he cared for her ; for he was a great fool about her
still — was almost afraid of seeing her — indeed, had not cared
much to look at any other woman since he parted from her.
That little figure coming toward him in the Grove, those
dark-fringed, childish eyes, the lovely lips put up to kiss him
— that picture had got no fainter with the lapse of months.
And she would look just the same. It was impossible to
think how he could meet her ; he should certainly tremble.
Strange, how long this sort of influence lasts j for he was cer-

ADAM BEDS.

397

tainly not in love with Hetty now ; he had been earnestly
desiring for months, that she should marry Adam, and there
was nothing that contributed more to his happiness in these
moments than the thought of their marriage. It was the exag-
gerating effect of imagination that made his heart still beat a
little more quickly at the thought of her. When he saw the
little thing again as she really was, as Adam's wife, at work
quite prosaically in her new home, he should, perhaps,
wonder at the possibility of his past feelings. Thank hea\ en
it had turned out so well ! He should have plenty of affairs
and interests to fill his life now, and not be in danger of
playing the fool again.

Pleasant the crack of the postboy's whip ! Pleasant the
sense of being hurried along in swift ease through English
scenes, so like those round his own home, only not quite so
charming. Here was a market-town — very much like Tred-
dleston — where the arms of the neighboring lord of the manor
were borne on the sign of the principal inn ; then mere fields
and hedges, their vicinity to a market-town carrying an agree-
able suggestion of high rent, till the land began to assume a
trimmer look, the woods were more frequent, and at length a
white or red mansion looked down from a moderate eminence,
or allowed him to be aware of its parapet and chimneys among
the dense-looking masses of oaks and elms — masses reddened
now with early buds. And close at hand came the village ;
the small church with its red-tiled roof, looking humble even
among the faded half-timbered houses ; the old green grave-
stones with nettles round them ; nothing fresh and bright but
the children, opening round eyes at the swift post-chaise ;
nothing noisy and busy but the gaping curs of mysterious
pedigree. What a much prettier village Hayslope was ! And
it should not be neglected like this place ; vigorous repairs
should go on everywhere among farm-buildings and cottages,
travellers in post-chaises, coming along the Rosseter road
should do nothing but admire as they went. And Adam Bede
should superintend all the repairs, for he had a share in
Purge's business now, and, if he liked, Arthur would put some
money into the concern, and buy the old man out in another
year or two. That was an ugly fault in Arthur's life, that
affair last summer ; but the future should make amends. Many
men would have retained a feeling of vindictiveness toward
Adam ; but /le would not — he would resolutely overcome all
littleness of that kind, for he had certainly been very much in
the wrong ; and though Adam had be^n harsh and violent, and

398

ADAM BEDS.

had thrust on him a painful dilemma, the poor fellow was in
love, and had real provocation. No ; Arthur had not an evU.
feeling in his mind toward any human being ; he was happy,
and would made every one else happy that came within his
reach.

And here was dear old Hayslope at last, sleeping on the
hill, like a quiet old place as it was, in the late afternoon sun-
light; and opposite to it the great shoulders of the Binton
Hills, below them the purplish blackness of the hanging
woods, and, at last, the pale front of the Abbey, looking out
from among the oaks of the Chase, as if anxious for the heir's
return. " Poor grandfather ! and he lies dead there. He was
a young fellow once, coming into the estate, and making his
plans. So the world goes round } Aunt Lydia must feel very
desolate, poor thing ; but she shall be indulged as much as
she indulges her fat Ji'ido."

The wheels of Arthur's chaise had been anxiously listened
for at the Chase, for to-day was Friday, and the funeral had
already been deferred two days. Before it drew up on the
gravel of the court-yard, all the servants in the house were
assembled to receive him with a grave, decent welcome, be-
fitting a house of death. A month ago, perhaps, it would have
been difificult for them to have maintained a suitable sadness
in their faces when Mr. Arthur was come to take possession ;
but the hearts of the head-servants were heavy that day for
another cause than the death of the old squire, and more than
one of them was longing to be twenty miles away, as Mr.
Craig was, knowing what was to become of Hetty Sorrel —
pretty Hetty Sorrel — whom they used to see every week.
They had the partisanship of household servants who like
their places, and were not inclined to go to the full length of
the severe indignation felt against him by the farming tenants,
but rather to make excuses for him ; nevertheless, the upper
servants, who had been on terms of neighborly intercourse
with the Poysers for many years, could not help feeling that
the longed-for event of the young squire's coming into the es-
tate had been robbed of all its pleasantness.

To Arthur it was nothing surprising that the servants look-
ed grave and sad ; he himself was very much touched on see-
ing them all again, and feeling that he was in a new relation
to them. It was that sort of pathetic emotion which has more
pleasure than pain in it, which is, perhaps, one of the most
delicious of all states to a good-natured man, conscious of the
power to satisfy his good-nature. His heart swelled agreeably
as he said.

ADAM BEDS. ,00

" Well, Mills, how is my aunt ? "

But now Mr, Bygate, the lawyer, who had been in the house
ever since the death, came forward to give deferential gi-eet-
ings and answer all questions, and Arthur walked with him
toward the library, where his aunt Lydia was expecting him.
Aunt Lydia was the only person in the house who knew noth-
ing about Hetty ; her sorrow as a maiden daughter was un-
mixed with any other thoughts than those of anxiety about
funeral arrangements and her own future lot ; and after the
manner of women, shemourned for the father who had made
her life important, all the more because she had a secret sense
that there was little mourning for him in other hearts.

But Arthur kissed her tearful face more tenderly than he
had ever done in his life before.

" Dear aunt," he said, affectionately, as he held her hand,
''your loss is the greatest of all, but you must tell me how to
try and make it up to you all the rest of your life."

"It was so sudden and so dreadful, Arthur," poor Miss
Lydia began, pouring out her little plaints j and Arthur sat
down to listen with impatient patience. When a pause came,
he said,

" Now, aunt, I'll leave you for a quarter of an hour, just
to go to my own room, and then I shall come and give full
attention to everything."

" My room is all ready for me, I suppose, Mills," he said
to the butler, who seemed to be lingering uneasily about the
entrance-hall,

" Yes, sir, and there are letters for you ; they are all laid
on the writing-table in your dressing-room."

On entering the small ante-room, which was called a dress-
ing-room, but which Arthur 'really used only to lounge and
write in, he just cast his eyes on the writing-table, and saw that
there were several letters and packets lying there ; but he was
in the uncomfortable dusty condition of a man who has had a
long, hurried journey, and he must really refresh himself by
attending to his toilet a little before he read his letters. Pym
was there, making everything ready for him ; and soon, with a
delightful freshness about him, as if he were prepared to begin
a new day, he went back into his dressing-room to open his
letters. The level rays of the low afternoon sun entered di-
rectly at_ the window, and, as Arthur seated himself in his velvet
chair, with their pleasant warmth upon him, he was conscious
of that quiet well-being which, perhaps, you and I have felt on
a sunny afternoon, when, in our brightest vouth and health,

4oo ADAM BEDE.

life has opened on a new vista for us, and long lo-morrows of
activity have stretched before us like a lovely plain, which
there was no need for hurrying to look at, because it was all
our own.

The top letter was placed with its address upward ; it was
in Mr. Irwine's handwriting, Arthur saw at once ; and below
the address was written, •' To be delivered as soon as he ar-
rives." Nothing could have been less surprising to him than
a letter from Mr. Irwine at that moment ; of course there was
something he wished Arthur to know earlier than it was pos-
sible for them to see each other. At such a time as that it
was quite natural that Irwine should have something pressing
to say. Arthur broke the seal with an agreeable anticipation
of soon seeing the writer.

" I send this letter to fneet you on your arrival, Arthur, be-
cause I may then be at Stoniton, whither I am railed by the most
painful duty it has ever been given i7ie to perform ; arid it is right
that you should know what I have to tell you without delay.

'' / will not attetnpt to add by one word of reproach to the ret-
ribution that is no7v falling on you; any other tvords that I could
write at this moment must be weak and unmeaning by the side of
those in which I ?nust tell you the siitiple fact.

'■'•Hetty Sorrel is in prison, and zu ill be tried on Friday for
the c?-ime of child-fnurder.'' . . .

Arthur read no more. He started up from his chair, and
stood for a single minute with a sense of violent convulsion in
his whole frame, as if the life were going out of him with hor-
rible throbs ; but the next minute he had rushed out of the
room, still clutching the letter — he was hurrying along the
corridor, and down the stairs into the hall. Mills was still
there, but Arthur did not see him, as he passed like a hunted
man across the hall and out along the gravel. The butler
hurried out after him as fast as his elderly limbs could run ;
he guessed, he knew, where the young squire was going.

When Mills got to the stables, a horse was being saddled,
and Arthur was forcing himself to read the remaining words
of the letter. He thrust it into his pocket as the horse was led
up to him. and at that moment caught sight of Mills's anxious
face in front of him.

" Tel! them I'm gone — zone to Stoniton," he said, in a
muffled tone of agitation — sprang into the saddle, and set off
■at a gallop.

ADAM BEDK ^qi

CHAPTER XLV.

IN THE PRISON.

Near sunset that evening an elderly gentleman was stand-
ing with his back against the smaller entrance-door of Stoniton
jail, saying a few last words to the departing chaplain. The
chaplain walked away, but the elderly gentleman stood stih,
looking dowii on the pavement, and stroking his chin, with a
ruminating air, when he was roused by a sweet clear woman's
voice, saying,

" Can I get into the prison, it yon please ? "

He turned his head, and looked fixedly at the speaker for
a few moments without answering.

" I have seen you before," he said, at last. " Do you re-
member preaching on the village green at Hayslope in Loam-
shire ? "

" Yes, sir, surely. Are you the gentleman that staid to
listen on horseback } "

" Yes. Why do you want to go into the prison ? "

" I want to go to Hetty Sorrel, the youn^ woman who has
been condemned to death— and to stay with her, if I may be
permitted. Have you power in the prison, sir.'' "

" Yes ; I am a magistrate, and can get admittauce for you.
But did you know this criminal, Hetty Sorrel ? "

" Yes, we are kin ; my own aunt married her uncle, Martin
Poyser. But I was away at Leeds, and didn't know of fliis
great trouble m time to get here before today. I entreat you,
sir, for the love of our heavenly Father, to let me ^o to her
and stay with her."

" How did you know she was condemned to death, if you
are only just come from Leeds 1 "

" I have seen my uncle since the trial, sir. He is gone
back to his home now, and the poor sinner is forsaken of all.
1 beseech you to get leave for me to be with her."

"What ! have you courage to stay all night in the prison ?
bhe IS very sullen, and will scarcely make answer when she is
spoken to."

1 . " ^I^', ^^^? ^^ may please God to open her heart, still. Don't
let us delay.'

_ 'I Come, then," said the elderly gentleman, ringing, and
gammg admission ; " I know you have a key to unlock hearts."

402

ADA.\r BRDE.

Dinah mechanically took off her bonnet and shawl as soon
as they were within the prison court, from the habit she had
of throwing them off when she preached or prayed, or visited
the sick ; and when they entered the jailer's room, she laid
them down on a chair unthinkingly. There was no agitation
visible in her, but a deep concentrated calmness, as if, even
when she was speaking, her soul was in prayer, reposing on
an unseen support.

After speaking to the jailer, the magistrate turned to her
and said, " The turnkey will take you to the prisoner's cell,
and leave you there for the night, if you desire it ; but you
can't have a light during the night — it is contrary to rules.
My name is Colonel Townley ; if I can help you in anything,
ask the jailer for my address, and come to me. I take some
interest in this Hetty Sorrel, for the sake of that fine fellow,
Adam Bede ; I happened to see him at Hayslope the same
evening I heard you preach, and recognized him in court to-
day, ill as he looked."

" Ah^! sir, can you tell me anything about him ? Can you
tell me where he lodges? For my poor uncle was too much
weighed down with trouble to remember."

" Close by here. I inquired all about him of Mr. Irwine.
He lodges over a tinman's shop, in the street on the right
hand as you entered the prison. There is an old schoolmaster
with him. Now good-by ; I wish you success."

" Farewell, sir. I am grateful to you."

As Dinah crossed the prison court with the turnkey, the
solemn evening light seemed to make the walls higher than
they were by day, and the sweet pale face in the cap was more
than ever like a white flower on this background of gloom.
The turnkey looked askance at her all the while, but never
spoke ; he somehow felt that the sound of his own rude voice
would be grating just then. He struck alight as they entered
the dark corridor leading to the condemned cell, and then
said in his most civil tone, " It'll be pretty nigh dark in the
cell a'ready ; but I can stop with my light a bit, if you like."

" Nay, friend, thank you," said Dinah. " I wish to go in
alone."

" As you like," said the jailer, turning the harsh key in the
lock, and opening the door wide enough to admit Dinah. A
jet of light from his lantern fell on the opposite corner of the
cell, where Hetty was sitting on her straw pallet with her face
buried in her knees. It seemed as if she were asleep, and yet
the grating of the lock would have been likely to waken her.

ADAM BEDE.

403

The door closed again, and the only light in tiie ce«H was that
of the evening sky, through the small high grating — enough
to discern human faces by. Dinah stood still for a minute,
hesitating to speak, because Hetty might be asleep ; and look-
ing at the motionless heap with a yearning heart. Then she
said, softly,

" Hetty !

There was a slight movement perceptible in Hetty's frame
— a start such as might have been produced by a feeble elec-
trical shock ; but she did not look up. Dinah spoke again,
in a tone made stronger by irrepressible emotion :

"Hetty . . . it's Dinah."

Again there was a slight startled movement through Hetty's
frame, and without uncovering her face, she raised her head
a little, as if listening.

" Hetty . . . Dinah is come to you."

After a moment's pause, Hetty lifted her head slowly and
timidly from her knees, and raised her eyes. The two pale
faces were looking at each other ; one with a wild, hard de
spair in it, the other full of sad, yearning love. Dinah uncon-
sciously opened her arms and stretched them out.

" Don't you know me, Hetty .'' Don't you remember Di-
nah ? Did you think I wouldn't come to you in trouble.''"

Hetty kept her eyes fixed on Dinah's face — at first like an
animal that gazes, and gazes, and keeps aloof.

" I'm come to be with you, Hetty — not to leave you — to
stay with you — to be your sister to the last."

Slowly, while Dinah was speaking, Hetty rose, took a step
forward, and was clasped in Dinah's arms.

They stood so a long while, for neither of them felt the
impulse to move apart again. Hetty, without any distinct
thought of it, hurvg on this something that was come to clasp
her now, while she was sinking helpless in a dark gulf ; and
Dinah felt a deep joy in the first sign that her love was wel-
comed by the wretched lost one. The light got fainter, as
they stood, and when at last they sat down on the straw pallet
together, their faces had become indistinct.

Not a word was spoken, Dinah waited, hoping for a spon-
taneous word from Hetty ; but she sat in the same dull despair,
only clutching the hand that held hers, and leaning her cheek
against Dinah's. It was the human contact she clung to, but
she was not the less sinking into the dark gulf.

Dinah began to doubt whether Hetty was conscious who it
was that sat beside her. She thought suffering and fear might

404

ADAM BEDE.

have driven the poor sinner out of her mind. But it was borne
in upon her, as she afterward said, that she must not hurry
God's work , we are over-hasty to speak — ^as if God did not
manifest himself by our silent feeling, and make his love felt
through ours. She did not know how long they sat in that
way, but it got darker and darker, till there was only a pale
patch of light on the opposite v/all ; all the rest was darkness.
But she felt the Divine Presence more and more — nay, as if
she herself were a part of it and it was the Divine pity that
was beating in her heart, and was willing the rescue of this
helpless one. At last she was prompted to speak, and find
out how far Hetty was conscious of the present.

"Hetty," she said, gently, "do you know who it is that
sits by your side ? "

" Yes," Hetty answered slowly, " it's Dinah."

" And do you remember the time when we were at the Hall
Farm together, and that night when I told you to be sure and
think of me as a friend in trouble .'' "

" Yes," said Hetty. Then, after a pause, she added, " But
you can do nothing for me. You can't make 'em do anything.
They'll hang me o' Monday — it's Friday now."

As Hetty said the last word she clung closer to Dinah,
shuddering^

" No, Hetty, I can't save you from that death. But isn't
the suffering less hard when you have somebody with you,
that feels for you — that you can speak to, and say what's in
your heart ? . . . Yes, Hetty ; you lean on me ; you are glad to
have me with you."

*' You won't leave me, Dinah ? You'll keep close to me ? "

^'No, Hetty, I won't leave you. I'll stay with you to the
last. . . . But, Hetty, there is some one else in this cell besides
me, -^ome one close to you."

Hetty said in a frightened whisper, " Who ? "

" S me ^w who has been with you through all your hours
of sin and trouble — who has known every thought you have
had — has seen where you went, where you laid down and rose
up again, and all the deeds you have tried to hide in darkness.
And on Monday, when I can't follow you — when my arms
can't reach you — when death has parted us — He who is with
us now, and knows all, will be with you then. It makes no
difference — whether we live or die, we are in the presence of
God."

" Oh, Dinah, won't nobody do anything for me ? Wil/ they
hang me for certain ? . . . I wouldn't mind if they'd let me live."

ADAM BEDE. 40^

"My poor Hetty, death is very dreadful ro you. I know
it's dreadful. But if you had a friend to take care of you after
death — in that other world — some one whose love is greater
than mine — who can do everything. ... If God our Father
was your friend, and was willing to save you from sin and
suffering, so as you should neither know wicked feelings nor
pain again } If you could believe he loved you and would
help you, as you believe I love you and will help you, it
wouldn't be so hard to die on Monday, would it ? "

" But I can't know anything about it," Hetty said, with sul-
len sadness.

" Because, Hetty, you are shutting up your soul against
him, by trying to hide the truth. God's love and mercy can
overcome all things — ignorance, and weakness, and all the
burden of our past wickedness — all things but our wilful sin ;
sin that we cling to, and will not give up. You believe in my
love and pity for you, Hetty ; but if you had not let me come
near you, if you wouldn't have looked at me or spoken to me,
you'd have shut me out from helping you ; I couldn't have
made you feel my love ; I couldn't have told you what I felt
for you. Don't shut God's love out in that way, by clinging to
sin. ... He can't bless you while you have one falsehood in
your soul ; his pardoning mercy can't reach you until you open
your heart to him, and say, ' I have done this great wickedness ;
O God, save me, make me pure from sin.' While you clino-
to one sin and will not part with it, it must drag you down to
misery after death, as it has dragged you to misery here in
this world, my poor, poor Hetty. It is sin that brings dread,
and darkness, and despair ; there is light and blessedness for
us as soon as we cast it off ; God enters our souls then, and
teaches us, and brings us strength and peace. Cast it off,
now, Hetty — now ; confess the wickedness you have done —
the sin you have been guilty of against God your heavenly
Father. Let us kneel down together, for we are in the pres-
ence of God."

Hetty obeyed Dinah's movement and sank on her knees.
They still held each other's hands, and there was long silence.
Then Dinah said,

" Hetty, we are before God : he is waiting for vou to tell
the truth." ^

, Still there was silence. At last Hetty spoke in a tone of
beseeching.

"Dinah . . . help me ... I can't feel anything like you
... my heart is hard."

4o6

ADAM BEDE,

Dinah held the clinging hand, and all her soul went forth
in her voice :

" Jesus, thou present Saviour ! Thou hast known the depths
of all sorrow : thou hast entered that black darkness where
God is not, and hast uttered the cry of the forsaken. Come,
Lord, and gather of the fruits of thy travail and thy pleading :
stretch forth thy hand, thou who art mighty to save to the ut-
termost, and rescue this lost one. She is clothed round with
thick darkness : the fetters of her sin are upon her, and she
cannot stir to come to thee : she can only feel that her heart
is hard, and she is helpless. She cries to me thy weak crea-
ture. . . . Saviour! it is a blind cry to thee. Hear it ! Pierce
the darkness ! Look upon her with thy face of love and sor-
row, that thou didst turn on him who denied thee ; and melt
her hard heart.

" See, Lord — I bring her, as they of old brought the sick
and helpless, and thou didst heal them : I bear her on my
arms and carry her before thee. Fear and trembling have
taken hold on her ; but she trembles only at the pain and death
of the body : breathe upon her thy life-giving Spirit, and put a
new fear within — the fear of her sin. Make her dread to keep
the accursed thing within her soul : make her feel the presence
of the living God, who beholds all the past, to whom the dark-
ness is as noon-day ; who is waiting now, at the eleventh hour,
for her to turn to him, and confess her sin, and cry for mercy
— now, before the night of death comes, and the moment of
pardon is forever fled, like yesterday that returneth not.

" Saviour ! it is yet time — time to snatch thi^ poor soul from
everlasting darkness. I believe — I believe in thy infinite love.
What is my love or my pleading ? It is quenched in thine. I
can only clasp her in my weak arms, and urge her with my
weak pity. Thou — thou wilt breathe on the dead soul, and it
shall arise from the unanswering sleep of death.

" Yea, Lord, I see thee, coming through the darkness, com-
ing, like the morning, with healing on thy wings. The marks
of thy agony are upon thee— I see, I see thou art able and
willing to save — thou wilt not let her perish forever.

" Come, mighty Saviour ! let the dead hear thy voice : let the
eyes of the blind be opened ; let her see that God encompasses
her ; let her tremble at nothing but at the sin that cuts her
off from him. Melt the hard 'heart ; unseal the closed lips:
make her cry with her whole soul, ' Father, I have sinned.' "

'- Dinah,'" Hetty sobbed out, throwing her arms round

^uAm hiljjE.

407

Dinah's neck, " I will speak ... I will tell ... I won't
hide it any more."

But the tears and sobs were too violent. Dinah raised her
gently from her knees, and seated her on the pallet again,
sitting down by her side. It was a long time before the con-
vulsed throat was quiet, and even then they sat some time in
stillness and darkness, holding each other's hands. At last
Hetty whispered,

" I did do it, Dinah .... I buried it in the wood .... the
little baby .... and it cried .... I heard it cry .... ever
such a way ofif .... all night .... and I went back because
it cried . . .

She paused, and then spoke hurriedly in a louder, plead-
ing tone.

'* But I thought perhaps it wouldn't die — there might some-
body find it. I didn't kill it— I didn't kill it myself. I put it
down there and covered up, and when I came back it was
gone. ... It was because I was so very miserable, Dinah . . .
I didn't know where to go . . . and I tried to kill myself be-
fore, and I couldn't. Oh, I tried so to drown myself in the
pool, and I couldn't. I went to Windsor— I ran away — did
you know } I went to find him, as he might take care of me ;
and he was gone j and then I didn't know what to do. I
daredn't go back home again — I couldn't bear it. I couldn't
have bore to look at anybody, for they'd have scorned me. I
thought o' you sometimes, and thought I'd come to you, for
I didn't think you'd be cross with me, and cry shame on
me : I thought I could tell you. But then, the other folks
'ud come toknow it at last, and I couldn't bear that. It was
partly thinking o' you made me come toward Stoniton ; and,
besides, I was so frightened at going wandering about till I
was a beggar-woman, and had nothing ; and sometimes it
seemed as if I must go back to the Farm sooner than that.
Oh ! it was so dreadful, Dinah ... I was so miserable ... I
\yished I'd never been born into this world. I should never
like to go into the fields again — I hated 'em so in my
misery."

Hetty paused again, as if the sense of the past were too
strong upon her for words.

" And then I got to Stoniton, and I began to feel frightened
that night, because I was so near home. And then the little
baby was born, when I didn't expect it ; and the thought came
into my mind that I might get rid of it, and go horne again.
The thought came all of a sudden, as I was lying in the bed,

4o8 ADAM BEvn.

and it got stronger and stronger .... I longed so to go back
again .... I couldn' bear being so lonely, and coming to beg
for want. And it gave me strength and resolution to get up
and dress myself. I felt I must do it .... I didn't know how
.... I thought I'd find a pool, if I could, like that other, in the
corner of the field, in the dark. And when the woman went

out, I felt as if I was strong enough to do anything I

thought I should get rid of all my misery, and go back home,
and never let 'em know why I ran away I put on my bonnet
and shawl, and went out into the dark street with the baby
under my cloak ; and I walked fast tili I got into a street a
good way off, and there was a public and I got some warm
stuff to drink and some bread. And I A'alked on, and on, and
I hardly felt the ground I trod on ; and it got lighter, for there
came the moon — oh, Dinah ! it frightened me when it first
looked at me out o' the clouds — it never looked so before ; and
I turned out of the road into the fields, for I was afraid o'
meeting anybody with the moon shining on me. And I came
to a hay-stack, where I thought I could lie down and keep
myself warm all night. There was a place cut into it, where I
could make me a bed ; and I lay comfortable, and the baby
was warm against me ; and I must have gone to sleep for a
good while, for when I woke it was morning, but not very light,
and the baby was crying. And I saw a wood a little way off
.... I thought there'd perhaps be a ditch or a pond there ....
and it was so early I thought I could hide the child there, and
get a long way off before folks was up. And then I thought
I'd go home — I'd get rides in carts and go home, and tell 'em
I'd been to try and see for a place, and- couldn't get one. I
longed so for it, Dinah — I longed so to be safe at home. I
don't know how I felt about the baby. I seemed to hate it —
it was like a heavy weight hanging round my neck ; and yet
its crying went through me, and I daredn't look at its little
hands and face. But I went on to the wood, and I walked
about, but there was no water "

Hetty shuddered. She was silent for some moments, and
when she began again, it was in a whisper.

" I came to a place where there was lots of chips and turf,
and I sat down on the trunk of a tree to think what I should
do. And all of a sudden I saw a hole under the nut-tree,
like a little grave. And it darted into me like lightning — I'd
lay the baby there, and cover it with the grass and the chips.
I couldn't kill it any other way. And I'd done it in a minute ;
and, oh, it cried so, Dinah — I couldn't cover it quite up — I

ADAM BEDE. 40^

thought, perhaps, somebody 'ud come and take care of it, and
then it wouldn't die. And I made haste out of the wood, but
I could hear it crying all the while ; and when I got out into
the fields, it was as if I was held fast — I couldn't go away,
for all I wanted so to go. And I sat against the hay-stack
to watch if anybody 'ud come ; I was very hungry, and I'd
only a bit of bread left ; but I couldn't go away. And after
ever such a while— hours and hours — the man came — him in
a smock-frock, and he looked at me so, I was frightened, and
I made haste and went on. I thought he was going to the
wood, and would, perhaps, find the baby. And I went right
on, till I came to a village, a long way off from the wood ;
and I was very sick, and faint, and hungry. I got something
to eat there, and bought a loaf. But I was frightened to stay.
I heard the baby crying, and thought the other folks heard it
too— and I went on. But I was so tired, and it was getting
toward dark. And at last, by the roadside there was a barn
— ever such a way off any house — like the barn in Abbot's
Close ; and I thought I could go in there and hide myself
among the hay and straw, and nobody 'ud be likely to come.
I went in, and it was half full o' trusses of straw, and there
was some hay too. And I made myself a bed, ever so far be-
hind, where nobody could find me ; and I was so tired and
weak, I went to sleep .... But oh ! the baby's crying kept
waking me ; and I thought that man as looked at me so was
come and laying hold of me. But I must have slept a long
while at last, though I didn't know ; for when I got up and
went out of the barn, I didn't know whether it was night or
morning. But it was morning, for it kept getting lighter ;
and I turned back the way I'd come. I couldn't help it,
Dinah ; it was the baby's crying made me go ; and yet I was
frightened to death. I thought that man in the smock-frock
'ud see me, and know I put the baby there. But I went on,
for all that I'd left off thinking about going home — it had
gone out o' my mind. I saw nothing but that place in the
wood where I'd buried the baby .... I see it now. Ob,
Dinah ! shall I allays see it ? "

Hetty clung round Dinah, and shuddered again. The
silence seemed long before she went on,

" I met nobody, for it was very early, and I got into the
wood. . . . I knew the way to the place . . . the place against

the nut-tree ; and I could hear it crying at every step

I thought it was alive. ... I don't know whether I was
frightened or glad. ... I don't know what I felt. I only

4IO

ADAM BEDE.

know I was in the wood and heard the oxy. I don't know
what I felt till I saw the baby was gone. And when I'd put
it there, I thought I should like somebody to find it, and save
it from dying ; but when I saw it was gone, I was struck like
a stone with fear. I never thought o' stirring, I felt so weak. I
knew I couldn't run away, and everybody as saw me 'ud know
about the baby. My heart went like a stone ; I couldn't wish
or try for anything : it seemed like as if I should stay there
forever, and nothing 'ud ever change. But they came and
took me away."

Hetty was silent, but she shuddered again, as if there
were still something behind ; and Dinah waited, for her heart
was so full that tears must come before words. At last Hetty
burst out, with a sob,

" Dinah, do you think God will take away that crying and
the place in the wood, now I've told everything .^ "

" Let us pray, poor sinner ; let us fall on our knees again,
and pray to the God of all mercy."

CHAPTER XLVI.

THE HOURS OF SUSPENSE.

On Sunday morning, when the church bells in Stoniton
were ringing for morning service, Bartle Massey re-entered
Adam's room after a short absence, and said,

" Adam, here's a visitor wants to see you."

Adam was seated with his back toward the door, but he
started up and turned round instantly, with a flushed face and
an eager look. His face was even thinner and more worn
than we have seen it before, but he was washed and shaven
this Sunday morning.

" Is it any news ? " he said.

*' Keep yourself quiet, my lad," said Bartle ; " keep quiet.
It's not what you're thinking of: it's the young Methodist
woman come from the prison. She's at the bottom o' the
stairs, and wants to know if you think well to see her, for she
has something to say to you about that poor castaway ; but
she wouldn't come in without your leave, she said. She

ADAM BEDE.

411

thought you'd perhaps like to go out and speak to her. Those
preaching women are not so back'ard commonly," Bartle mut-
tered to himself.

"Ask her to come in," said Adam.

He was standing with his face toward the door, and as
Dinah entered, lifting up her mild gray eyes toward him, she
saw at once the great change that had come since the day
when she had looked up at the tall man in the cottage.
There was a trembling in her clear voice as she put her hand
into his, and said,

" Be comforted, Adam Bede ; the Lord has not forsaken
her."

" Bless you for coming to her," Adam said. " Mr. Massey
brought me word yesterday as you was come."

They could neither of them s\y any more just yet, but
stood before each other in silence ; and Bartle Massey, too,
who had put on his spectacles, seemed transfixed examining
Dinah's face. But he recovered himself first, and said, " Sit
down, young woman, sit down," placing the chair for her, and
retiring to his old seat on the bed.

" Thank you, friend, I won't sit down," said Dinah, "for
I must hasten back ; she entreated me not to stay long away.
What I came for, Adam Bede, was to pray you to go and see
the poor sinner, and bid her farewell. She desires to ask
your forgiveness, and it is meet you should see her to-day
rather than in the early morning, when the time will be
short."

Adam stood trembling, and at last sank down on his chair
again.

" It won't be," he said ; " it'll be put ofif — there'll perhaps
come a pardon. Mr. Irwine said there was hope ; he said I
needn't quite give it up."

" That's a blessed thought to me," said Dinah, her eyes
filling with tears. " It's a fearful thing hurrying her soul away
so fast.

" But let what will be," she added, presently, " you will
surely come, and let her speak the words that are in her heart.
Although her poor soul is very dark, and discerns little be-
yond the things of the flesh, she is no longer hard ; she is
contrite — she has confessed all to me. The pride of her
heart has given way, and she leans on me for help, and desires
to be taught. This fills me with trust ; for I cannot but think
that the brethren sometimes err in measuring the Divine love
by the sinner's knowledge. She is going to write a letter to

412

ADAM BEDE.

the friends at the Hall Farm for me to give them when she is
gone ; and when I told her you were here, she said, ' I should
like to say good-by to Adam, and ask him to forgive me.'
You will come, Adam ? perhaps you will even now come back
with me."

" I can't," Adam said ; " I can't say good-by while there's
any hope. I'm listening, and listening — I can't think o'
nothing but that. It can't be as she'll die that shameful death
— I can't bring my mind to it."

He got up from his chair again, and looked away out of
the window, while Dinah stood with compassionate patience.
In a minute or two he turned round, and said,

" I will come, Dinah .... to-morrow morning .... if
it must be. I may have more strength to bear it, if I know
it 7nust be. Tell her I forgive her ; tell her — I v.'ill come at
the very last."

" I will not urge you against the voice of your own heart,"
said Dinah. " I must hasten back to her, for it is wonderful
how she clings now, and was not willing to let me out of her
sight. She used never to make any return to my affection be-
fore, but now tribulation has opened her heart. Farewell,
Adam ; our heavenly Father comfort you, and strengthen you
to bear all things." Dinah put out her hand, and Adam
pressed it in silence.

Bartle Massey was getting up to lift the stiff latch of the
door for her, but, before he could reach it, she had said,
gently, " Farewell, friend," and was gone, with her light step,
down the stairs.

" Well," said Bartle, taking off his spectacles, and putting
them into his pocket, " if there must be women to make
trouble in the world, it's but fair there should be women to
be comforters under it ; and she's one — she's one. It's a pity
she's a Methodist ; but there's no getting a woman without
pome foolishness or other."

Adam never went to bed that night ; the excitement of
suspense, heightening with every hour that brought him
nearer the fatal moment, was too great ; and, in spite of his
entreaties, in spite of his promises that he would be perfectly
quiet, the schoolmaster watched too.

"What does it matter to me, lad?" Bartle said: "a
night's sleep more or less. I shall sleep long enough, by
and by, underground. Let me keep thee company in trouble
while I can."

It was a long and dreary night in that small chamber.

ADAM BEDE. ^^-

Adam would sometimes get up, and tread backward and for-
ward along the short space from wall to wall ; then he would
sit down and hide his face, and no sound would be heard but
the ticking of the watch on the table, or the falling of a cinder
from the fire which the schoolmaster carefully tended. Some-
times he would burst out into vehement speech.

" If I could ha' done anything to s.ive her — if my bearing
anything would ha' done any good ... but t' have to sit still,
and know it, and do nothing . . . it's hard for a man to bear
. . . and to think o' what might ha' been now, if it hadn't
been for hi7n. . . O God, it's the verv day we should ha' been
married."

"Ay, my lad," said Bartle. tenderly, "it's heavy— it's
heavy. But you must remember this : when vou thought of
marr)-ing her, you'd a notion she'd got another sort of a na-
ture inside her. You didn't think she could have got hard-
ened in that little while to do what she's done."

" I know— I know that," said Adam. " I thouo-ht she
was loving and tender-hearted, and wouldn't tell a lie or act
deceitful. How could I think any other way t And if he'd
never come near her, and I'd married her, and been lovin<r to
her, and took care of her, she might never ha' done an^-thing
bad. What would it ha' signified— mv having a bit o' trouble
with her >. It 'ud been nothing to this."

_ " There's no knowing, my1ad— there's no knowing what
might have come. The smart's bad for you to bear now • you
must have tune—you must have time. But I've that opinion
of you, that you'll rise above it all, and be a man again ; and
there may good come out of this that we don't see."

"Good come out of it ! " said Adam Dassionatelv. " That
doesn t alter th' evil : her ruin can't be undone. I 'hate that
talk o' people, as if there was a way o' making amends for
everything. They'd more need be brought to see as the
wrong they do can never be altered. When a man's spoiled
his fellow-creature's life, he's no right to comfort himself with
thinking good may come out of it : somebody else's good
doesn t alter her shame and misery."

. " Well, lad, well," said Bartle, in a gentle tone, strangely
m contrast with his usual peremptoriness and impatience of
contradiction, "it's likely enough I talk foolishness : I'm an
cm fellow, and it's a good many years since I was in trouble
myself. It's easy finding reasons why other folks should be
patient.

" Mr. Massey," said Adam, penitently, " I'm very hot and

414

ADA A/ BEDE.

hasty. I owe you something different ; but you mustn't take
it ill of me."

"Not I, lad— not I."

So the night wore on in agitation, till the chill oawn and
the growing light brought the tremulous quiet that comes
on in the brink of despair. There would soon be no more
suspense.

" Let us go to the prison now, Mr. Massey," said Adam,
when he saw the hand of his watch at six.

" If there's any news come, we shall hear about it."

The people were astir already, moving rapidly, in one di-
rection, through the streets. Adam tried not to think where
they were going, as they hurried past him in that short
space between his lodging and the prison gates. He was
thankful when the gates shut him in from seeing those eager
people.

No ; there was no news come — no pardon — no reprieve.

Adam lingered in the court half an hour, before he could
bring himself to send word to Dinah that he was come. But
a voice caught his ear : he could not shut out the words :

" The cart is to set off at half-past seven."

It must be said — the last good-by : there was no help.

In ten minutes from that time Adam was at the door of
the cell. Dinah had sent him word that she could not come
to him, she could not leave Hetty one moment ; but Hetty
was prepared for the meeting.

He could not see her when he entered, for agitation dead-
ened his senses, and the dim cell was almost dark to him.
He stood a moment after the door closed behind him, trem-
bling and stupefied.

But he began to see through the dimness — to see the dark
eyes lifted up to him once more, but with no smile in them.
O God, how sad they looked ! The last time they had met
his was when he parted from her with his heart full of joyous,
hopeful love, and they looked out with a tearful smile from a
pink, dimpled, childish face. The face was marble now \ the
sweet lips w-ere pallid, and half-open, and quivering ; the
dimples were all gone — all but one, that never went ; and the
eyes — Oh ! the worst of all was the likeness they had to
Hetty's. They were Hetty's eyes looking at him with that
mournful gaze, as if she had come back to him from the dead
to tell him of her misery.

She was clinging close to Dinah ; her cheek was against
Dinah's. It seemed as if her last faint strength and hope

ADAM BEDE. ,,„

lay in that contact ; and the pitying love that shone out from
Dinah's face looked Hke a visible pledge of the invisible Mercy.

When the sad eyes met— when Hetty and Adam looked
at each other, she felt the change in him too, and it seemed
to strike her with fresh fear. It was the first time she had
seen any being whose face seemed to reflect the change in
herself : Adam was a new image of the dreadful past and
the dreadful present. She trembled more as she looked at him.
^ " Speak to him, Hetty," Dinah said ; " tell him what is
in your heart."

Hetty obeyed her, like a little child.

"Adam . . . I'm very sorry ... I behaved very wrong
to you . . . will you forgive me . . . before I die } "

Adam answered with a half-sob : " Yes, I forgive thee,
Hetty; I forgave thee long ago."

It had seemed to Adam as if his brain would burst with
the anguish of meeting Hetty's eyes in the first moments ; but
the sound of her voice uttering these penitent words, touched
a chord which had been less strained ; there was a sense of
relief from what was becoming unbearable, and the rare tears
came— they had never come before, since he had hung on
Seth's neck in the beginning of his sorrow.

Hetty made an involuntary movement toward him ; some
of the love that she had once lived in the midst of was come
near her again. She kept hold of Dinah's hand, but she went
up to Adam and said, timidly,

"Will you kiss me again, Adam, for all I've been so
wicked ? "

Adam took the blanched wasted hand she put out to him,
and they gave each other the solemn unspeakable kiss of a
life-long parting.

^^ "And tell him," Hetty said, in rather a stronger voice,
' tell him ... for there's nobody else to tell him ... as I
went after him and couldn't find him . . . and I hated him
and cursed him once ... but Dinah savs, I should forgive
him . . . and I try . . . for else God won't forgive me."

There was a noise at the door of the cell now— the key
was being turned in the lock, and when tl.e door opened,
Adam saw indistinctly that there were several faces there ;
he was too agitated to see more— even to see that Mr. Irwine's
face was one of them. He felt that the last preparations
were beginning, and he could stay no longer. Room was
silently made for him to depart, and he went to his chamber
in loneliness, leaving Bartle Mass*^y to watch and see the end.

4i6 ADAM BEDS.

CHAPTER XLVII.

THE LAST MOMENT.

It was a sight that some people remembered better even
than their own sorrows — the sight in that gray clear morning,
when the fatal cart with the two young women in it was de-
scried by the waiting, watching multitude, cleaving its way
toward the hideous symbol of a deliberately-inflicted sudden
death.

All Stoniton had heard of Dinah Morris, the young Metho-
dist woman who had brought the obstinaf^e criminal to con-
fess, and there was as much eagerness to see her as to see
the wretched Hetty.

But Dinah was hardly conscious of the multitude. When
Hetty had caught sight of the vast crowd in the distance, she
had clutched Dinah convulsively.

" Close your eyes, Hetty," Dinah said, " and let us pray,
without ceasing, to God."

And in a low voice, as the cart went slowly along through
the midst of the gazing crowd, she poured forth her soul with
the wrestling intensity of a last pleading, for the trembling
creature that clung to her and clutched her as the only visible
sign of love and pity.

Dinah did not know that the crowd was silent, gazing at
her with a sort of awe — she did not even know how near they
were to the fatal spot, when the cart stopped, and she shrank
appalled at a loud shout, hideous to her ear, like a Vast yell
of demons. Hetty's shriek mingled with the sound, and they
clasped each other with mutual horror.

But it was not a shout of execration — not a yell of exultant
cruelty.

It was a shout of sudden excitement at the appearance of a
horseman cleaving the crowd at full gallop. The horse is hot
and distressed, but answers to the desperate spurring; the
rider looks as if his eves were glazed by madness, and he saw
nothing but what was unseen by others. See, he has some-
thing in his hand — he is holding it up as if it were a signal.

The sheriff knows him ; it is Arthur Donnithorne, carrying
in his hand the hard-won release from death.

ADAM BEDE. > ^,y

CHAPTER XLVIII.

ANOTHER MEETING IN THE WOOD.

The next day, at evening, two men were walking from
opposite points toward tiie same scene, drawn thither by a
common memory. The scene was the Grove by Donnithorne
Chase ; you know wlio the men were.

The old squire's funeral had taken place that morning,
the will had been read, and now, in the first breathing space,
Arthur Donnithorne had come out for a lonely walk, that he
might look fixedly at the new future for him, and confirm
himself in a sad resolution. He thought he could do that
best in the Grove.

Adam, too, had come from Stoniton on Monday evening,
and to-day he had not left home, except to go to the family
at the Hall Farm, and tell them everything that Mr. Irwine
had left untold. He had agreed with the Poysers that he
would follow them to their new neighborhood, wherever that
might be ; for he meant to give up the management of the
woods, and, as soon as it was practicable, he would wind up
his business with Jonathan Burge, and settle with his mother
and Seth in a home within reach of the friends to whom he
felt bound by a mutual sorrow.

'^' Seth and me are sure to find work," he said. " A man
that's got our trade at his finger ends is at home everywhere ;
and we must make a new start. My mother won't stand in

quiet she's been ever since I came back. It seems as if the
very greatness o' the trouble had quieted and calmed her.
We shall all be better in a new country, though there's some
I shall be loath to leave behind. But"^: won't part from you
and yours, if I can help it. Mr. Poyser. Trouble's made us
kin."

" Ay, lad," said Martin. " We'll go out o' hearing o' that
man's name. But I doubt we shall ne'er go far enough for
folks not to find out as we've got them beIonf!;ing to us as are
transported o'er the seas, and war like to be hanrred. We
shall have that flying up in our faces, and our children's aftei
us."

41 5 ADAM BEDS.

That was a long visit to the Half Farm, and drew two
strongly on Adam's energies for him to think of seeing others,
or re-entering on his old occupations till the morrow. " But
to-morrow," he said to himself, " I'll go to work again, I
shall learn to like it again some time rnay be ; and it's right,
whether I like it or not."

This evening was the last he would allow to be absorbed
by sorrow ; suspense was gone now, and he must bear the
unalterable. He was resolved not to see Arthur Donnithorne
again, if it were possible to avoid him. He had no message
to deliver from Hetty now, but Hetty had seen Arthur; and
Adam distrusted himself ; he had learned to dread the vio-
lence of his own feeling. That word of Mr. Irwine's — that
he must remember what he had felt after giving the last blow
to Arthur in the Grove — had remained with him.

These thoughts about Arthur, like all thoughts that are
charged with strong feeling, were continually recurring, and
they always called up the image of the Grove — of that spot
under the overarching boughs wliere he had caught sight of
the two bending figures, and had been possessed by sudden
rage.

" I'll go and see it again to-night for the iast time," he
said ; " it'll do me good ; it'll make me feel over again what
I felt when I'd knocked him down. I felt what poor empty
work it was, as soon as I'd done it, l>efore I began to think
he might be dead."

In this way it happened that Arthur and Adam were walk-
ing toward the same spot at the same time.

Adam had on his working dress again iiow — for he had
thrown off the other with a sense of relief as soon as he came
home ; and if he had had the basket of tools over his shoulder,
he might have been taken, with his pale wasted face, for the
spectre of the Adam Bede who entered the Grove on that
August evening eight months ago. But he had no basket of
tools, and he was not walking with the old erectness, looking
keenly round him ; his hands were thrust in his side pockets,
and his eyes rested chiefly on the ground. He had not long
entered the Grove, and now he paused before a beech. He
knew that tree well ; it was the boundary mark of his youth —
the sign to him of the time wlien some of his earliest, strong-
est feelings had left him. He felt sure they would never
return. And yet, at this moment, there was a stirring of affec-
tion at the remembrr-nce of that Arthur Donnithorne whom
he had believed in before he had come up to this beech eight

ADAM BEDE. ^Iq

nionths ago. It was affection for the dead ; that Arthur ex-
isted no longer.

He was disturbed by the sound of approaching footsteps,
but the beech stood at a turning in the road, and he could not
see who was coming, until the tall slim figure in deep mourn-
ing suddenly stood before him at only two yards' distance.
They both started, and looked at each other in silence. Often,
in the last fortnight, Adam had imagined himself as close to
Arthur as this, assailing him with words that should be as
harrowing as the voice of remorse, forcing upon him a just
share in the misery he had caused ; and often, too, he had told
himself that such a meeting had better not be. But in imagin-
ing the meeting he had always seen Arthur as he had met him
on that evening in the Grove, florid, careless, light of speech ;
and the figure before him touched him with the signs of suffer-
ing. Adam knew what suffering was — he could not lay a
cruel finger on a bruised man. He felt no impulse that he
needed to resist : silence was more just than reproach. Arthur
was the first to speak.

" Adam," he said, quietl)^ " it maybe a good thing that we
h«ave met here, for I wished to see you. 1 should have asked
to see you to-morrow."

He paused, but Adam said nothing.

" I know it is painful to you to meet me," Arthur went on,
"but it is not likely to happen again for years to come."

_ " No, sir," said Adam, coldly, " that was what I meant to
write to you to-morrow, as it would be better all dealino-s
should be an end between us, and somebody else put in my
place." ^

Arthur felt the answer keenly, and it was not without an
effort that he spoke again.

"It was partly on that subject I wished to speak to you.
I don't want to lessen your indignation against me, or ask
you to do anything for my sake. I only wish to ask you if
you will help me to lessen the evil consequences of the past,
which 15 unchangeable. I don't mean consequences to mvself'
but to others. It is but little I can do, I know. I know the
worst consequences will remain ; but something may be done,
and you can help me. Will you listen to me patiently.' "

" Yes, sir," said Adam, after some hesitation ; " I'll hear
what it is. If I can help mend anything, I will. Anger 'uj
mend nothing I know, We've had enough o' that."

" I was going to the Hermitage," said Arthur. " Will you
^0 there with me and sit down ? We can talk better there."

42 o

ADAM BEDE.

The Hermiiage had never been entered since they left if
together, for Arthur had locked up the key in his desk. And
now, when he opened the door, there was the candle burned
out in the socket ; there was the chair in the same place where
Adam remembered sitting ; there was the waste-paper basket
full of scraps, and deep down in it, Arthur felt in an instant,
there was the little pink silk handkerchief. It would have
been painful to enter this place if their previous thoughts had
been less painful.

They sat down opposite each other in the old places, and
Arthur said, " I'm going away, Adam ; I'm going into the
army."

Poor Arthur felt that Adam ought to be affected by this
announcement — ought to have a movement of sympathy tow-
ard him. But Adam's lips remained firmly closed, and the
expression of his face unchanged.

" What I want to say to you," Arthur continued, " is this :
one of my reasons for going away is, that no one else may
leave Hayslope — may leave their home on my account. I
would do anything, there is no sacrifice I would not make, to
prevent any farther injury to others through my — through what
has happened."

Arthur's words had precisely the opposite effect to that he
.had anticipated. Adam thought he perceived in them that
notion of compensation for irretrievable wrong, that self-sooih-
ing attempt to make evil bear the same fruits as good, which
most of all roused his indignation. He was as strongly impel-
led to look painful facts right in the face, as Arthur was to
turn away his eyes from them. Moreover, he had the wake-
ful suspicious pride of a poor man in the presence of a rich
man. He felt his old severity returning as he said,

" The time's passed for that, sir. A man should make
sacrifices to keep clear of doing a wrong ; sacrifices won't undo
it when it's done. When people's feelings have got a deadly
wound, they can't be cured with favors."

" Favors ! " said Arthur passionately ; " no ; how can you
suppose I meant that ? But the Poysers — Mr. Irwine tells me
the Poysers mean to leave the place where they have lived so
many years — for generations. Don't you see, as Mr. Irwine
does, that if they could be persuaded to overcome the feeling
that drives them away, it would be much better for them in
the end to remain on the old spot, among the friends and
neighbors who know them ? "

" That's true," said Adam, coldly. " But then, sir, folks's

ADAM BEDE.

421

feelings are not so easily overcome. It'll be hard for Martin
Poyser to go to a strange place among strange faces, when
he's been bred up on the Hall Farm, and his father before
him ; but then it 'ud be harder for a man with his feelings to
stay. I don't see how the thing's to be made any other than
iiard. There's a sort o' damage, sir, that can't be make up for.

Arthur was silent some moments. In spite of other feel-
ings, dominant in him this evening, his pride winced under
Adam's mode of treating him. Wasn't he himself suffering?
Was not he, too, obliged to renounce his most cherished
hopes ? It was now as it had been eight months ago — Adam
was forcing Arthur to feel more intensely the irrevocableness of
his own wrong-doing : he was presenting the sort of resistance
that was the most irritating to Arthur's eager, ardent nature.
But his anger was subdued by the same influence that had
subdued Adam's when they first confronted each other — by
the marks of suffering in a long-familiar face. The momentary
struggle ended in the feeling that he could bear a great deal
from Adam, to whom he had been the occasion of bearing so
much; but there was a touch of pleading, boyish vexation in
his tone as he said,

" But people may make injuries worse by unreasonable
conduct — by giving w'ay to anger, and satisfying that for the
moment, instead of thinking what will be the effect in the
future.

" If I were going to stay here and act as landlord," he
added, presently, with still more eagerness — " if I were care-
less about what I've done — what I've been the cause of, you
would have some excuse, Adam, for going away and encourag-
ing others to go. You would have some excuse then for
trying to make the evil worse. But when I tell you I'm going
away for years — when you know what that means for me, how
it cuts off every plan of happiness I've ever formed — it is im-
possible for a sensible man like you to believe that there is
any real ground for the Poysers refusing to remain. I know
their feeling about disgrace — Mr. Irwine has told me all ; but
he is of opinion that they might be persuaded out of Uiis idea
that they are disgraced in the eyes of their neighbors, and
that they can't remain on my estate, if you would join him in
his efforts — if you would sta}- yourself, and go on managing
the old woods."

Arthur paused a moment, and then added, pleadingly,
"You know that's a good work to do for the sake of other
people, besides the owner ; and you don't know but that they

432

ADAM BiLiyt:..

may have a better owner soon, whom you will like to work for.
If I die, my cousin Tradgett will have the estate and take mj
name. He is a good fellow."

Adam could not help being moved : it was impossible for
him not to feel that this was the voice of the honest, warm-
hearted Arthur whom he had loved and been proud of in old
days ; but nearer memories would not be thrust away. He was
silent ; yet Arthur saw an answer in his face that induced him
to go on with growing earnestness.

" And then if you would talk to the Poysers — if you would
talk the matter over with Mr. Irwine — he means to see you to-
morrow— and then if you would join your arguments to his to
prevail on them not to go. ... I know, of course, that they
would not accept any favor from me — I mean nothing of that
kind; but I'm sure they would suffer less in the end. Irwine
thinks so too ; and Mr. Irwine is to have the chief authority
on the estate — he has consented to undertake that. They will
really be under no man but one whom they respect and like.
It would be the same with you, Adam ; and it could be noth-
ing but a desire to give me worse pain that could incline you
to go."

Arthur was silent again for a little while, and then said,
with some agitation in his voice,

" I wouldn't act so toward you, I know. If )'ou were in
my place and I in yours, I should try to help you to do the
best."

Adam made a hasty movement on his chair, and looked
on the ground. Arthur went on :

" Perhaps you've never done anything you've had bitterly
to repent of in your life, Adam ; if you had you would be more
generous. You would know then that it's worse for me than
for you."

Arthur rose from his seat with the last words, and went to
one of the windows, looking out and turning his back on
Adam, as he continued, passionately,

'* Haven't / loved her too ? Didn't I see her yesterday ?
Sha'n't I carry the thought of her about with me as much as
you will ? And don't you think you would suffer more if you'd
been in fault ? "

There was silence for several minutes for the struggle in
Adam's mind was not easily decided. Facile natures, whose
emotions have little permanence can hardly understand how
much inward resistance he overcame before he rose from his
seat and turned toward Arthur. Arthur heard the movement,

ADAM BE DE.

and turning round, met the sad but softened look with which
Adam said,

" It's true what you say, sir, I'm hard— it's in my nature.
I was too hard with my father for doing wrong. I've been a
bit hard t' everybody but her. I felt as if nobody pitied her
enough— her suffering cut into me so ; and when I thought
the tolks at the Farm were too hard with her, I said I'd never
be hard to anybody myself again. But feeling overmuch
about her has perhaps made me unfair to you. I've known
what it IS in my life to repent and feel it's too late • I felt I'd
been too harsh to my fatiier when he was gone from me-I
feel It now, when I think of him. I've no right to be hard tow-
ards them as have done wrong and repent."

Adam spoke these words with the firm distinctness of a
man who is resolved to leave nothing unsaid that he is bound
to say ; but he went on with more hesitation.

"1 wouldn't shake hands with you once, sir, when you
asked me— but if you're willing to do it now, for all I refused
then "...

Arthur's white hand was in Adam's large grasp in an in-
stant, and with that action there was a strong rush, on both
sides, of that old, boyish affection.

" Adam," Arthur said, impelled to full confession now
"it would never have happened, if I'd known you loved her'
That would have helped to save me from it. And I did struo--
gle ; I never meant to injure her. I deceived vou afterward
—and that led on to worse ; but I thought it was forced upon
me, I thought it was the best thing I could do. And in that
letter, I told her to let me know if she were in any trouble ;
don't think I would not have done evervthing I could'
But I was all wrong from the yery first, and horrible wrong
has come of it. God knows I'd give my life if I could undo in"

They sat down again opposite each other, and Adam said,
tremulously,

" How did she seem when you left her. sir >. "
_'' Don't ask me, Adam," Arthur said /" I feel sometimes
as If I should go mad with thinking of her looks and what
she said to me, and then, that I couldn't get a full pardon
—that I couldn't save her from that wretched fate of being
transported— that I can do nothing for her all those years ;
and she may die under it, and never know comfort any
more. ^

_ " Ah ! sir," said Adam, for the first time feeling his own
pain merged in sympathy for Arthur, " you and me'll often

424 ADAM BEDE.

be thinking o' the same thing, when we're a long way off
one another. I'll pray God to help you, as I pray him to help
me."

" But there's that sweet woman — that Dinah Morris,"
Arthur said, pursuing his own thoughts, and not knowing
what had been the sense of Adam's words, "she says she shall
stay with lier to the very last moment — till she goes ; and the
poor thing clings to her as if she found some comfort in her,
I could worship that woman ; 1 don't know what I should do
if she were not there. Adam, you will see her when she
comes back ; I could say nothing to her yesterday — nothing
of what I felt toward h.,;r. Tell her," Arthur went on, hur-
riedly, as if he wanted to hide the emotion with which he
spoke, while he took off his chain and watch — " tell her I
asked you to give her this in remembrance of me — of the man
to whom she is the one source of comfort, when he thinks
of ... I know she doesn't care about such things — or any-
thing else I can give her for its own sake. But she will use
the v/atch — I shall like to think of her using it."

" I'll give it to her, sir," Adam said, " and tell her your
words. She told me she should come back to the people at
the Hall Farm."

"And you tc//// persuade the Poysers to stay, Adam," said
Arthur, reminded of the subject which both of them had for-
gotten in the first interchange of revived friendship. " You
will stay yourself, and help Mr. Irwine to carry out the repairs
and improvements on the estate ? "

" There's one thing, sir, that perhaps you don't take ac-
count of," said Adam, with hesitating gentleness, " and that
was what made me hang back longer. You see, it's the same
with both me and the Poysers ; if we stay, it's for our own
worldly interest, and it looks as if we'd put up with anything
for the sake o' that. I know that's what they'll feel, and I
can't help feeling a little of it myself. When folks have got
an honorable, independent spirit, they don't like to do any-
thing that might make 'em seem base-minded."

" But no one who knows you will think that, Adam ; that
is not a reason strong enough against a course that is really
more generous, more unselfish than the other. And it will be
known — it shall be made known, that both you and the Poy-
sers staid at my entreaty. Adam, don't try to make things
worse for me ; I'm punished enough without that."

" No, sir, no," Adam said, looking at Arthur with mourn-
ful affection. " God forbid I should make things worse for

ADAM BEDE.

42s

you. I used to wish I could do it, in my passion — bur that
was when I thought you didn't feel enough. I'll stay, sir ; I'll
do the best I can. It's all I've got to think of now — to do my
work well, and make the world a bit better place for them as
can enjoy it."

" Then we'll part now, Adam. You will see Mr. Irwine
to-morrow, and consult with him about everything."

'' Are you going soon, sir ? " said Adam.

" As soon as possible — after I have made the necessan,-
arrangements. Good-by, Adam. I shall think of you goin^^
about the old place."

" Good-b}-, sir. God bless you."

The hands were clasped once more;, and Adam left the
Hermitage, feeling that sorrow was more bearable now, hatred
was gone.

As soon as the door was closed behind him, Arthur went
to the waste-paper basket and took out the little pink silk
handkerchief.

CHAPTER XLIX.

AT THE HALL FARM.

The first autumnal afternoon sunshine of 1801 — more Aan
eighteen months after that parting of Adam and Arthur in the
Hermitage — was on the yard at the Hall Farm, and the bull-
dog was in one of his most excited moments ; for it was that
hour of the day when the cows were being driven into the
yard for their afternoon milking. No wonder the patient
beasts ran confusedly into the wrong places, for the alarming
din of the bull-dog was mingled with more distant sounds
which the timid feminine creatures, with pardonable supersti-
tion, imagined also to have some relation to their own move-
ments— with the tremendous crack of the wagoner's whip, the
roar of his voice, and the booming thunder of the wagon, as it
left the rick-yard empty of its golden load.

The milking of the cows was a sight Mrs. Poyser loved,
and at this hour on mild days she was usually standing at the
house door, with her knitting in her hands, in quiet contem-
plation, only heightened to a keener interest when the vicious
yellow cow, who had once kicked over a pailful of precious

426 ADAM BEDE.

milk, was about to undergo the preventive punishment of hav-
ing her hinder leg strapped.

To-day, however, Mrs. Poyser gave but a divided attention
to the arrival of the cows, for she was in eager discussion with
Dinah, who was stitching Mr. Poyser's shirt-collars and had
borne patiently to have her thread broken three times by Totty
pulling at her arm with a sudden insistance that she should
look at " Baby," that is, at a large wooden doll with no legs
and a long skirt, whose bald head Totty, seated in her small
chair at Dinah's side, was caressing and pressing to her fat
cheek with much fervor. Totty is larger by more than two
years' growth than when you first saw her, and she has on a
black frock under her pinafore ; Mrs. Poyser too has on a
black gown, which seems to heighten the family likeness be-
tween her and Dinah. In other respects there is little out-
ward change now discernible in our old friends, or in the
pleasant house-place, bright with polished oak and pewter.

" I never saw the like to you, Dinah," Mrs. Poyser was
saying, " when you've once took anything into your head ;
there's no more moving you than the rooted tree. You may
say what you like, but I don't believe that's religion ; for what's
the sermon on the Mount about, as you're so fond o' reading
to the boys, but doing what other folks 'ud have you do ? But
if it was anything unreasonable they wanted you to do, like
taking your cloak off and giving it to 'em, or letting 'em slap
you i' the face, I dare say you'd be ready enough ; it's only
when one 'ud have you do what's plain common-sense and
good for yourself, as you're obstinate the other way."

" Nay, dear aunt," said Dinah, smiling slightly as she went
on with her work, " I'm sure your wish 'ud be a reason for
me to do anything that I didn't feel it was wrong to do."

" Wrong ! You drive me past bearing. What is there
wrong, I should like to know, i' staying along wi' your own
friends, as are th' happier for having you with 'em, an' are
willing to provide for you, even if your work didn't more nor
pay 'em for the bit o' sparrow' svictual y' eat, and the bit o'
rag you put on ! 'An' who is it, I should like to know, as
you're bound t' help and comfort i' the world more nor your
own flesh and blood — an' me th' only aunt you've got above-
ground, an' am brought to the brink o' the grave welly every
winter as conies, an' there's the child as sits beside you 'ull
break her little heart when you go, an' the grandfather not been
dead a twelvemonth, an' your uncle 'ull miss you so as never
was — a-lighting his pipe an' waiting on him, an' now I can

ADAM BEDE. 427

trust you wi' the butter, an' have had all the trouble o' teach-
ing you, an' there's all the sewing to be done, an' I must have
a strange gell out o' Treddles'on to do it— an' ail because
you must go back to that bare heap o' stones as the very crows
fly over an' won't stop at."

" Dear aunt Rachel," said Dinah, looking up in Mrs. Pey-
ser's face, " It's your kindness makes you say I'm useful to you
You don't really want me now ; for Nancy and Molly are
clever at their work, and you're in good health now, by the
blessing of God, and my uncle is of a cheerful countenance
agam, and you have neighbors and friends not a few — some
of them come to sit with my uncle almost daily. Indeed, you
will not miss me; and at Snowfield there are brethren 'and
sisters in great need, who have none of those comforts vou
have round you. I feel that I am called back to those among
whom my lot was first cast ; I feel drawn again toward the
hills where I used to be blessed in carrying the word of life
to the sinful and desolate."

" You feel ! yes," said INIrs. Poyser, returning from a paren-
thetic glance at the cows. " That's allays the reason I'm to
sit down wi', when you've a mind to do anything contrairy.
What do you want to be preaching for more than you're
preaching now } Don't you go off, the Lord knows where,
every Sunday, a-preaching and praying .? an' haven't you got
Methodists enow at Treddles'on to go and look at, if church
folks' faces are too handsome to please you ? an' isn't there
them i' this parish as you've got under hand, and they're like
enough to make friends wi' old Harry again as soon as your
back is turned } There's that Bessy Cranage— she'll be flaunt-
ing i' new finery three weeks after you're gone, I'll be bound ;
she'll no more go on in her new ways without you, than a dog
'uU stand on Us hind-legs when ther's nobody looking. But
I suppose it doesna matter so much about folks's souls i' this
country, else you'd be for staying with your own aunt, for she's
none so good but what you might help her to be better.

There was a certain something in Mrs. Poyser's voice just
then, which she did not wish to be noticed, so she turned
round hastily to look at the clock, and said ; " See there !
It's tea-time ; an' if Martin's i' the rick-yard, he'll like a cup.
Here, Totty, my chicken, let mother put your bonnet on, and
then you go out into the rick-yard and see if father's there,
and tell him he mustn't go away again without coming t' have
a cup o' tea ; and tell your brothers to come in too."

Totty trotted off in her flapping bonnet, while Mrs. Poy

428 A3AM BEDS,

ser set out the bright oak table, and reached down the tea-
cups.

" You talk o' them gells Nancy and Molly behig clever i'
their work," she began again ; " it's fine talking. They're all
the same, clever or stupid — one can't trust 'em out o' one's
sight a minute. They want somebody's eye on 'em constant
if they're to be kept to their work. An' suppose I'm ill again
this winter, as I was the winter before last, who's to look
after 'em then, if you're gone ? An' there's that blessed
child — something's sure t' happen to her — they'll let her tum-
ble into the fire, or get at the kettle wi' the boiling lard in't,
or some mischief as 'ull lame her for life ; an it'll be all your
fault, Dinah."

" Aunt," said Dinah, " I promise to come back to you in
the winter if you're ill. Don't think I will ever stay away
from you if you're in real want of me. But indeed it is need-
ful for my own soul that I should go away from this life of
ease and luxury, in which I have all things too richly to en-
joy— at least that I should go away for a short space. No
one can know but myself what are my inward needs, and the
besetments I am most in danger from. Your wish for me to
stay is not a call of duty which I refuse to hearken to because
it is against my own desires ; it is a temptation that I must
resist, lest the love of the creature should become like a mist
in my soul shutting out the heavenly light."

" It passes my cunning to know what you mean by ease
and luxury," said Mrs. Poyser, as she cut the bread and but-
ter. " It's true there's good victual enough about you, as no-
body shall ever say I don't provide enough and to spare, but
if there's ever a bit o' odds an' ends as nobody else 'ud eat,
you're sure to pick it out .... but look there ! there's Adam
Bede a carrying the little un in. I wonder how it is he's come
so early."

Mrs. Poyser hastened to the door for the pleasure of look-
ing at her darling in a new position, with love in her eyes, but
reproof on her tongue.

" Oh, for shame, Totty ! Little gells o' five years old
should be ashamed to be carried. Why, Adam, she'll break
your arm, such a big gell as that ; set her down for shame ! "

" Nay, nay," said Adam, " I can lift her with my hand,
I've no need to take my arm to it."

Totty, looking as serenely unconscious of remark as a fat
white puppy, was set down at the door-place, and the mother
tnforced her reproof with a shower of kisses.

ADAM BEDE

429

" You're surprised to see me at this hour o' the day," said
Adam.

" Yes, but come in," said Mrs. Poyser, making way for
him ; " there's no bad news, I hope ? "

" No, nothing bad," Adam answered, as he went up to
Dinah and put out his hand to her. She had laid down her
worlv and stood up, instinctively, as he approached her. A
faint blush died away from her pale cheek as she put her hand
in his, and looked up at him timidly.

" It's an errand to you brought me, Dinah," said Adam,
apparently unconscious that he was holding her hand all the
while ; " mother's a bit ailing, and she's set her heart on your
coming to stay the night with her, if you"li be so kind. I told
her I'd call and ask you as I came from the village. She over-
works herself, and I can't persuade her to have s little girl t'
help her. I don't know what's to be done."

Adam released Dinah's hand as he ceased speaking, and
was expecting an answer ; but before she had opened her lips,
Mrs, Poyser sa d,

" Look there now ! I told you there was folks enow t' help
i' this parish without going farther off. There's Mrs, Bede get-
thing as old and cas'alty as can be, and she won't let anybody
but you go a-nigh her hardly. The folks at Snowfield have
learned by this time to do better wi'out you nor she can."

" I'll put my bonnet on and set off directly, if you don't
want anything done first, aunt," said Dinah, folding up her
work

" Yes, I do want something done. I want you t' have
your tea, child ; it's all ready ; and you'll have a cup, Adam,
if y' arena in too big a hurry."

" Yes, I'll have a cup, please ; and then I'll walk with
Dinah. I'm going straight home, for I've got a lot o' timber
valuations to write out."

" Why, Adam, lad, are you here ? " said Mr. Poyser, en-
tering, warm and coatless, with the two black-eyed boys be-
hind him, still looking as much like him as two small elephants
are like a large one. " How is it we've got sight o' you so
long before foddering-time ? "

" I came on an errand for mother," said Adam, " She's
got a touch of her old complaint, and she wants Dinah to go
and stay with her a bit."

"Well, we'll spare her for your mother a little while,"
said Mr. Poyser. " But we wonna spare her for anybody else,
on'y her husband."

43°

ADAM BEDE.

" Husband ! " said Marty, who was at the most prosaic
and literal period of the boyish mind, " why Dinah hasn't got
a husband ? "

" Spare her," said Mrs. Poyser, placing a seed-cake on
the table, and then seating herself to pour out the tea. " But
we must spare her, it seems, and not for a husband neither,
but for her own megrims. Tommy, what are you doing to
your little sister's doll ? making the child naughty, when she'd
be good if you'd let her. You siianna have a morsel o' cake
if you behave so."

Tommy, with true brotherly sympathy, was amusing him-
self by turning Dolly's skirt over her bald' head, and exhibit-
ing her truncated body t the general scorn — an indignity
which cut Totty to the heart.

" What do you think Dinah's been a-telling me since din-
ner-time ? " Mrs. Poyser continued, looking at her husband.

" Eh ! I'm a poor un at guessing," said Mr. Poyser.

" Why, she means to go back to Snowfield again, and work
i' the mill, and starve herself, as she used to do, like a creat-
u e as has got no friends."

Mr. Poyser did not readily find words to express his un-
pleasant astonishment ; he only looked from his wife to Dinah,
who had now seated herself beside Totty, as a bulwark against
brotherly playfulness, and was busying herself with the chil-
dren's tea. If he had been given to making general reflec-
tions, it would have occurred to him that there was certainly
a change come over Dinah, for she never used to change
color ; but, as it was, he merely observed that her face was
flushed at that moment. Mr. Poyser thought she looked the
prettier for it ; it was a flush no deeper than the petal of a
monthly rose. Perhaps it came because her uncle was look-
ing at her so fixedly, but there is no knowing ; for just then
Adam was saying, with quiet surprise,

" Why, I hoped Dinah was settled among us for life. I
thought she'd given up the notion o' going back to her old
country."

" Tliought ! yis ? " said Mrs. Poyser ; " and so would any-
body else ha' thought as had got their right end up'ard. But
I suppose you must l>e a Methodist to know what a Methodist
'ull do. It's ill guessing what the bats are flying after."

" Why, what have we done to you, Dinah, as you must go
away from us ? " said Mr. Poyser, still pausing over his tea-
cup. " It's like breaking your word welly ; for your aunt
never had no thought but you'd make this your home."

ADAM BEDS, 43 1

•* Nay, uncle," said Dinah, trying to be quite calm. " When
I first came I said it was only for a time, as long I could be of
any comfort to my aunt. '

" Well, an' who said you'd ever left off being a comfort to
me ? '-" said Mrs. Poyser. " If you didna mean to stay wi' me
you'd better never ha' come. Them as ha' never had a cushion
don't miss it."

" Nay, nay," said Mr. Poyser, who objected to exaggerated
views. " Thee mustna say so ; we should ha' been ill off wi'-
out her Lady-day was a twelvemont' ; we mun be thankful
for that, whether she stays or no. But I canna think what
she mun leave a good home for, to go back int' a country
where the land, most on't, isna worth ten shillings an acre,
rent and profits."

'• Why, that's just the reason she wants to go, as fur as she
can give a reason," said Mrs. Poyser. " She says this coun-
try's too comfortable, and there's too much t' eat, an' folks
arena miserable enough. And she's going next week ; I
canna turn her, say what I will. It's allays the way wi' them
meek-face .1 people; you may's well pelt a bag o' feathers as
talk to 'em. But /say it isna religion, to be so obstinate — is
it now, Adam .'' "

Adam saw that Dinah was more disturbed than he had
ever seen her by any matter relating to herself, and, anxious
to relieve her if possible, he said, looking at her affectionately,

" Nay, I can't find fault with anything Dinah does. I be-
lieve her thoughts are better than our guesses, let 'em be what
they may. I should ha' been thankful for her to stay among
us ; but if she thinks well to go, I wouldn't cross her, or make
it hard to her by objecting. We owe her something different
to that."

As it often happens, the words intended to relieve her were
just too much for Dinah's susceptible feelings at this moment.
The tears came into the gray eyes too fast to be hidden; and
she got up hurriedly, meaning to be understood that she was
going to put on her bonnet.

" Mother, what's Dinah crying for ? " said Totty. " She
isn't a naughty dell."

" Thee'st gone a bit too fur," said Mr. Poyser. " We've
no right t' interfere with her doing as she likes. An' thee'dst
be as angry as could be wi' me if I said a word against any-
thing she did."

" Because you'd very like be finding fault wi'out reason,"
said Mrs. Poyser. " But there's reason i' what I' say, else I

432

Ai)AA/ BEDE

sliouldna say it. It's easy talking for then as can't love hef
so well as her own aunt does. An' me got so used to her !
1 shall feel as uneasy as a new-sheared sheep when she's gone
from me. An' to think of her leaving a parish where she's so
looked on. There's' Mr. Irwine makes as much of her as if
she was a lady, for all her being a Methodist, an' wi' that
maggot o' preaching in her head ; God fcrgi' me if I'm i' the
wrong to call it so."'

" Ay," said Mr. Poyser, looking jocose ; " but thee dostna
tell Adam what he said to thee about it one day. The missis
was saying, Adam, as the preaching was th' only fault to be
found wi' Dinah, and Mr. Irwine says, • But you mustn't find
fault with her for that, Mrs. Poyser ; you forget she's got no
husband to preach to. I'll answer for it, you give Poyser
many a good sermon.' The parson had thee there," Mr. I'oy-
ser added, laughing unctuously. " I told Eartle Massey on it,
an' he laughed too."

" Yes, it's a small joke sets men laughing when they sit
a staling at one another with a pipe i' their mouths," said
Mrs. Poyser. "Give Bartle Massey his way, and he'd have all
the sharpness to himself. If the chafif-cutter had the making
of us, we should all be straw, I reckon. Totty, my chicken,
go up stairs to cousin Dinah, and see what she's doing, and
give her a pretty kiss."

This errand was devised for Totty as a means of check-
ing certain threatening symptoms about the corners of the
mouth ; for Tommy, no longer expectant of cake, was lifting
up his eyelids with his forefingers and turning his eyeballs
toward Totty, in a way that she felt to be disagreeably per-
sonal.

" You're rare and busy how — eh, Adain ? " said ATr. Poy-
ser. " Purge's getting so bad wi' his asthmy, its well if he'll
ever do much riding about again."

" Yes, we've got a pretty bit o' building on hand now,"
said Adam : "what with the repairs on th' estate, and the new
houses at Treddles'on."

" I'll bet a penny that new house Purge is building on his
own bit o' land is for him and Mary to go to," said Mr. Poy-
ser. " He'll be for laying by business soon. I'll warrant, and
be wanting you to take to it all, and pay him so much bv th'
'ear. We shall see you living on th' hill before anoilui"
twelvemont's over."

"Well," said Adam, " I should like t' have the business
in my own hands. It isn't as I mind much about getting

ADAM BEDE. 433

any more money ; we've enough and to spare now, with only
our two selves and mother ; but I should like to have my own
way about things ; 1 could try plans then as I can't do now."

"You get on pretty well wi' the new steward, I reckon ? "
said Mr. Peyser.

"Yes, yes; he's a sensible man enough ; understands
farming — he's carrying on the draining, and all that, capital.
You must go some day toward to the Stonyshire side, and see
what alterations they're making. But he's got no notion
about b:.uldings ; you can so seldom get hold of a man as can
turn his brains to more nor one thing ; it's just as if they wore
blinkers like th' horses, and could see nothing o' one side of
'em. Now, there's Mr. Irwine has got notions o' building
more nor most architects; for as for th' architects, they set up
to be fine fellows, but the most of 'em don't know where to set
a chimney so as it shan't be quarrelling with a door. My no-
tion is, a practical builder, that's got a bit o' taste, makers the
best architect for common things ; and I've ten times the
pleasure i' seeing after the work when I've made the plan
myself."

Mr, Poyser listened with an admiring interest to Adam's
discourse on building : but perhaps it suggested to him that
the building of his corn-rick had been proceeding a little
too long without the control of the master's eye ; for when
Adam had done speaking, he got up and said,

"Well, lad. I'll bid you good-by, now, for I'm off to the
rick-yard again."

Adam rose too. for he saw Dinah entering, with her bonr
net on, and a little basket in her hand, preceded by Totty.

"You're ready. I see, Dinah," Adam said; "so we'll set
off, for the sooner I'm at home the better."

" Mother," said Totty, with her treble pipe, "Dinah was
saying her prayers and cr}-ing ever so."

" Hush ! hush ! " said the mother; "little gells mustn't
chatter."

Whereupon the father, shaking with silent laughter, set
Totty on the white deal table, and desired her to kiss him.
Mr. and Mrs. Poyser, you perceive, had no correct principles
of education.

" Come back to-morrow, if Mrs. Bede doesn't want you,
Dinah," said Mrs. Poyser; "but you can stay, you know, if
she is ill."

So, when the good-bys had been said, Dinah and Adam
left the Hall Farm together.

434-

ADAM BEDE

CHAPTER L.

IN THE COTTAGE.

Adam did not ask Dinah to take his arm when they got
out into the lane. He had never yet done so, often as they
had walked together ; for he had observed that she had never
walked arm-in-arm with Seth, and he thought perhaps that
kind of sujDport was not agreeable to her. So they walked
apart, though side by side, and the close poke of her little
black bonnet hid her face from him.

" You can't be happy, then, to make the Hall Farm your
home, Dinah ? " Adam said, with the quiet interest of a brother,
who has no anxiety for himself in the matter. " It's a pity,
seeing they're so fond of you."

" You know, Adam, my heart is as their heart, so far as
love for them and care for their welfare goes ; but they are in
no present need, their sorrows are healed, and I feel that I
am called back to my old work, in which I found a blessing
that I have missed of late in the midst of too abundant worldly
good. I know it is a vain thought to flee from the work that
God appoints us, for the sake of finding a greater blessing to
our own souls, as if we could choose for ourselves where we
shall find the fulness of the Divine Presence, instead of seek-
ing it where alone it is to be found, in loving obedience. But
now, I believe, I have a clear showing that my work lies else-
where— at least for a time. In the years to come, if my aunt's
health should fail, or she should otherwise need me, I shall
return."

" You know best, Dinah," said Adam. " I don't believe
you'd go against the wishes of them that love you, and are
akin to you, without a good and sufficient reason in your own
conscience. I've no right to say anything about my being
sorry : you know well enough what cause I have to put you
above every other friend I've got ; and if it had been ordered
so that you could ha' been my sister, and lived with us all our
lives, I should ha' counted it the greatest blessing as could
happen to us now ; but Seth tells me there's no hope o' that :
your feelings are different ; and perhaps I'm taking too much
upon me to speak about it."

ADAM BEDE,

435

Dinah made no answer, and they walked on in silence for
some yards, till they came to the stone stile ; where, as Adam
had passed through first, and turned round to give her his
hand while she mounted the unusually high step, she could
not prevent him from seeing her face. It struck him with
surprise ; for the gray eyes, usually so mild and grave, had
the bright uneasy glance v/hich accompanies suppressed agita-
tion, and the slight flush in her cheeks, with which she had
come down stairs, was heightened to a deep rose-color. She
looked as if she was only sister to Dinah. Adam was silent
with surprise and conjecture for some moments, and then he
said,

" I hope I've not hurt or displeased you by what I've
said, Dinah : perhaps I was making too free. I've no wish
different from what you see to be best ; and I'm satisfied for
you to live thirty miles oft", if you think it right. I shall think
of you just as much as I do now ; for you're bound up with
what I can no more help remembering than I can help my
heart beating."

Poor Adam ! Thus do men blunder. Dinah made no
answer, but she presently said,

" Have you heard any news from that poor young man
since we last spoke of him ? "

Dinah always called Arthur so ; she had never lost the
image of him as she had seen him in the prison.

" Yes," said Adam. " Mr. Irwine read me part of a letter
from him yesterday. It's pretty certain, they say, that there'll
be a peace soon, though nobody believes it'll last long ; but
he says he doesn't mean to come home. He's no heart for it
yet ; and it's better for others that he should keep away. Mr.
Irwine thinks he's in the right not to come : it's a sorrov/ful
letter. He asks about you and the Poysers, as he always
does. There's one thing in the letter cuts me a good deal :
'You can't think what an old fellow I feel,' he says ; ' I make
no schemes now. I'm the best when I've a good day's march
or fighting before me.' "

" He's of a rash, warm-hearted nature, like Esau, for whom
I have always felt great pity," said Dinah. "That meeting
between the brothers, where Esau is so loving and generous,
and Jacob so timid and distrustful, notwithstanding his sense
of the Divine favor, has always touched me greatly. Truly,
I have been tempted sometimes to sa}', that Jacob was of a
mean spirit. But that is our trial : we must learn to see the
good in the midst of much that is unlovely,"

436 ADAM BEDE.

" Ah ! " said Adam, " I like to read about Moses best, in

th' Old Testament. He carried a hard business well through,
and died when other folks were going to reap the fruits ; a
man must have courage to look at his life so, and think what'll
come of it after he's dead and gone. A good solid bit o' work
lasts ; if it's only laying a floor down, somebody's the better
for it being done well, besides the man as does it."

They were both glad to talk of subjects that were not per-
sonal, and in this way they went on till they passed the bridge
across the Willow Brook, when Adam turned round and said,

" Ah ! here's Seth. I thought he'd be home soon. Does
he laiow of your going, Dinah ? "

" Yes, I told him last Sabbath."

Adam remembered now that Seth had come home much
depressed on Sunday evening, a circumstance which had been
very unusual with him of late, for the happiness he had in
seeing Dinah every week seemed long to have outweighed the
pain of knowing she would never marry him. This evening
he had his habitual air of dreamy benignant contentment,
until became quite close to Dinah, and saw the traces of tears
on her delicate eyelids and eyelashes. He gave one rapid
glance at his brother ; but Adam was evidently quite outside
the current of emotion that had shaken Dinah ; he wore his
everyday look of unexpectant calm. Seth tried not to let
Dinah see that he had noticed her face, and only said,

" I'm thankful you're come, Dinah, for mother's been hun-
gering after the sight of you all day. She began to talk of
you the first thing in the morning."

When they entered the cottage, Lisbeth was seated in her
arm-chair, too tired with setting out the evening meal, a task
she always performed a long time beforehand, to go and meet
them at the door as usual when she heard the approaching
footsteps.

" Coom, child, thee't coom at last," she said, when Dinah
went toward her. " What dost mane by lavin' me a week,
an' ne'er coomin' a-nigh me ? "

" Dear friend," said Dinah, taking her hand, " you're not
well. If I'd known it sooner, I'd have come."

" An' how's thee t' know if thee dostna coom ? Th' lads
o'ny know what I tell 'em ; as long as ye can stir hand and
foot the men think ye're hearty. But I'm none so bad, on'y
a bit of cold sets me achin'. An' th' lads tease me so t' ha'
somebody wi' me t' do the work — they make me ache wuss
wi' talkin'. If thee'dst come and stay wi' me, they'd let me

ADAM BEDS.

437

alone. The Poysers canna want thee so bad as I do. But
take thy bonnet off, an' let me look at thee."

Dinah was moving away, but Lisbeth held her fast, while
she was taking off her bonnet, and looked at her face, as one
looks into a newly-gathered snowdrop, to renew the old im-
pressions of purity and gentleness.

" What's the matter wi' thee } " said Lisbeth, in astonish-
ment ; " thee'st been a-cryin'."

" It's only a grief that'll pass away," said Dinah, who did
not wish just now to call forth Lisbeth's remonstrances by
disclosing her intention to leave Hayslope. " You shall know
about it shortly — we'll talk of it to-night. I shall stay with
you to-night."

Lisbeth was pacified by this prospect ; and she had the
whole evening to talk with Dinah alone ; for there was a new
room in the cottage, you remember, built nearly two years ago,
in the expectation of a new inmate ; and here Adam always
sat when he had writing to do, or plans to make. Seth sat
there too this evening, for he knew his mother would like to
have Dinah all to herself.

There were two pretty pictures oh the two sides of the
wall in the cottage. On one side there was the broad-shoul-
dered, large-featured, hardy old woman, in her blue jacket and
buff kerchief, with her dim-eyed anxious looks turned continu-
ally on the lily face and the slight form in the black dress that
were either moving lightly about in helpful activity, or seated
close by the old woman's arm-chair, holding her withered hand,
with eyes lifted toward her to speak a language which Lisbeth
understood far better than the Bible or the hymn-book She
would scarcely listen to reading at all to-night. " Nay, nay
shut the book," she said. " We mun talk. I want t' know
what thee wast cryin' about. Hast got troubles o' thy own,
like other folks ? "

On the other side of the wall there were the two brothers,
so like each other in the midst of their unlikeness ; Adam,
with knit brows, shaggy hair, and dark vigorous color, ab-
sorbed in his " figuring ; " Seth, with large rugged features,
the close copy of his brother's, but with thin wavy brown hair
and blue dreamy eyes, as often as not looking vaguely out of
the window instead of at his book, although it was a newly-
bought book — Wesley's abridgment of Madame Guyon's Life,
which was full of wonder and interest for him. Seth had said
to Adam, " Can I help thee with anything in here to-night?
I don't want to make a noise in the shop."

^38 ADAM BEDE.

" No, lad," Adam answered, " there's nothing but what I
must do myself. Thee'st got thy new book to read."

And often, when Seth was quite unconscious', Adam, as he
paused after drawing a line v/ith his ruler, looked at his brother
with a kind smile drawing in his eyes. He knew " th' lad
liked to sit full o' thoughts he could give no account of ;
they'd never come t' anything, but they made him happy \ "
and in the last year or so, Adam had been getting more and
more indulgent to Seth. It was part of that growing tender-
ness which came from the sorrow at work within him.

For Adam, though you see him quite master of himself,
working hard and delighting in his work after his inborn
inalienable nature, had not outlived his sorrow — had not felt
it slip from him as a temporary burden, and leave him the
same man again. Do any of us ? God forbid. It would be
a poor result of all our anguish and our wrestling, if we w> u
nothing but our old selves at the end of it — if we could return
to the same blind loves, the same self-confident blame, the
same light thoughts of human suffering, the same frivolous
gossip over blighted human lives, the same feeble sense of
that Unknown toward which we have sent forth irrepressible
cries in our loneliness. Let us rather be thankful that our sor-
row lives in us as an indestructible force, only changing its
form, as forces do, and passing from pain into sympathy — the
one poor word which includes all our best insight and our
best love. Not that this transformation of pain into sympathy
had completely taken place in Adam yet ; there was still a
great remnant of pain, which he felt would subsist as long as
^er pain was not a memory, but an e.xisting thing, which he
must think of as renewed with the light of every new morning.
But we get accustomed to mental as well as bodily pain, with-
out, for all that, losing our sensibility to it ; it becomes a habit
of our lives, and we cease to imagine a condition of perfect
ease as possible for us. Desire is chastened into submission ;
and we are contented with our day when we have been able to
bear our grief in silence, and act as if we were not suffering.
For it is at such periods that the sense of our lives having
visible and invisible relations be3fond any of which either our
present or prospective self is the centre, grows like a muscle
that we are obliged to lean on and exert.

That was Adam's state of mind in this second autumn of
his sorrow. His work, as you know, had always been part of I
his religion, and from very early days he sav.' clearly that good
carpentry was God's will — was that form of God's will that

ADAM BEDE. 4,0

most immediately concerned him ; but now there was no
margin of dreams for him beyond this daylight reality, no
holiday-time in the working-day world ; no moment in tho
distance when duty would take off her iron glove and breast-
plate, and clasp him gently into rest. He conceived no
picture of the future but one made up of hard working day^
such as he lived through, with growing contentment and iR>
tensity of interest, every fresh week ; love, he thought, could
never be anything to him but a living memory— a limb lopped
off, but not gone from consciousness. He did not know that
the power of loving was all the while gaining new force within
him ; that the new sensibilities bought by a deep experience
were so many new fibres by which it was possible, nay, neces-
sary to him, that his nature shall intertwine with another.
Yet he was aware that common affection and friendship were
more precious to him than they used to be— that he clung more
to his mother and Seth, and had an unspeakable satisfaction
in the sight or imagination of any small addition to her hap-
piness. The Poysers, too— hardly three or four days passed
but he felt the need of seeing them, and interchanging words
and looks of friendliness with them ; he would have felt this,
probably, even if Dinah had not been with them ; but he
had only said the simplest truth in telling Dinah that he put
her above all other friends in the world. Could anything be
more natural ? For in the darkest moments of memory the
thought of her always came as the first ray of returning com-
fort ; the early days of gloom at Hall Farm had been grad-
ually turned into soft moonlight in her presence ; and in the
cottage, too — for she had come at every spare moment to
soothe and cheer poor Lisbeth, who had been stricken with a
fear that subdued even her querulousness, at the sight of her
darling Adam's care-worn face. He had become used to
watching her light, quiet movements, her pretty loving ways
to the children, when he went to the Hall Farm ; to listen for
her voice as for recurrent music ; to think everything she
said and did was just right, and could not have been better.
In spite of his wisdom, he could not find fault with her for
her over-indulgence for the children, who had managed to
convert Dinah the preacher, before whom a circle of rough
men had often trembled a little, into a convenient household
slave ; though Dinah herself was rather ashamed of this
weakness, and had some inward conflict as to her departure
f^om the precepts of Solomon. Yes, there was one thing that
might have been better; she might have loved Seth, and con-

44°

ADAM BEDE.

sented to marry him. He felt a little vexed for his brother's
sake ; and he could not help thinking regretfully how Dinah,
as Seth's wife, could have made their home as happy as it
could be for them all — how she was tlie one being that would
have soothed their mother's last days into peacefulness and
rest.

" It's wonderful she doesn't love th' lad," Adam had said
sometimes to himself, " for anybody 'ud think he was just
cut out for her. But her heart's so taken up with other
things. She's one o' those women that feel no drawing toward
having a husband and children o' their own. She thinks she
should be filled up with her own life then ; and she's been
so used to living in other folks's cares, she can't bear the
thoughts of her heart being shut up from 'em. I see how it
is, well enough. She's cut out o' different stuff from most
women ; I saw that long ago. She's never easy but when
she's helping somebody, and marriage 'ud Interfere with her
ways — that' true. I've no right to be contriving and thinking
it 'ud be better if she'd have Seth, as if I was wiser than she
is — or than God either, for he made her what she is, and
that's one o' the greatest blessings I've ever had from his
hands, and other besides me."

This self-reproof had recurred strangely to Adam's mind,
when he gathered from Dinah's face that he had wounded
her by referring to his wish that she had accepted Seth, and
so he had endeavored to put into the strongest words his con-
fidence in her decision as right — his resignation to her going
away from them, and ceasing to make part of their life other-
wise than by living in their thoughts, if that separation were
chosen by herself. He felt sure she knew quite well enough
how much he cared to see her continually — to talk to her
with the silent consciousness of a mutual great remembrance.
It was not possible she could hear anything but self-renouncing
affection and respect in his assurance that he was contented
for her to go away ; and yet there remained an uneasy feeling
in his mind that he had not said quite the right thing — that,
somehow, Dinah had not understood him.

Dinah must have risen a little before the sun the next
morning, for she was down stairs about five o'clock. So was
Seth ; for, through Lisbeth's obstinate refusal to have any
woman-helper in this house, he had learned to make himself,
as Adam said, "very handy in the housework," that he might
save his mother from too great weariness ; on which ground
I hope you will not think him unmanly, any more than you

ADAM BEDE. 44I

can have thought the gallant Colonel Bath unmanly when he
made the gruel for his invalid sister. Adam, who had sat up
late at his writing, was still asleep, and was not likely, Seth
said, to be down till breakfast-time. Often as Dinah had
visited Lisbeth during the last eighteen months, she had never
slept in the cottage since the night after Thias's death, when,
you remember, Lisbeth praised her deft movements, and even
gave a modified approval to her porridge. But in that long
interval Dinah had made great advances in household clever-
ness ; and this morning, since Seth was there to help, she
was bent on bringing everything to a pitch of cleanliness and
order that would have satisfied her aunt Poyser. The cottage
was far from that standand-at present, for Lisbeth's rheum-
atism had forced her to give up her old habits of dilettante
scouring and polishing. When the house-place was to her
mind, Dinah went into the new room, where Adam had been
writing the night before, to see what sweeping and dusting
were needed there. She opened the window and let in the
fresh morning air, and the smell of the sweet-brier, and the
bright Jow-slanting rays of the early sun, which made a glory
about her pale face and pale auburn hair as she held the long
brush, and swept, singing to herself in a very low tone — like
a sweet summer murmur that you have to listen for very
elosely — one of Charles Wesley's hymns :

" Eternal Beam of Light Divine,
Fountain of unexhausted love,
In whom the Father's glories shine.
Through earth beneath and heaven above.

" Jesus ! the weary wanderer's rest,
Give me thy easy yoke to bear ;
With steadfast patience arm my breast
With spotless love and holy fear.

" Speak to my warring passions, ' Peace ! '
Say to my trembling heart, ' Be still 1 '
Thy power my strength and fortress is,
For all things serve thy sovereign will."

She laid by the brush, and took up the duster ; and if you
had ever lived in Mrs. Poyser's household, you would know
how the duster behaved in Dinah's hand — how it went into
every small corner, and on every ledge in and out of sight — .
how it went again and again round every bar of the chairs,
and every leg, and under and over everything that lay on the
table, till it came to Adam's papers and rulers, and the opea
desk near them. Dinah dusted up the very edge of these,
and then hesitated, looking at them with a longing but timid

442

ADAM BEDE.

eye. It was painful to see how much dust there was among
them. As she was looking in this way, she heard Seth's step
just outside the open door toward which her back was turned,
and said, raising her clear treble,

" Seth," is your brother wrathful when his papers are
stirred ? "

" Yes, very, when they are not put back in the right
places," said a deep strong voice, not Seth's.

It was as if Dinah had put her hands unawares on a
vibrating chord ; she was shaicen with an intense thrill, and
for the instant felt nothing else ; then she knew her cheeks
were glowing, and dared not look round, but stood still, dis-
tressed because she could not say good-morning in a friendly
way. Adam, finding that she did not look round so as to the
smile on his face, was afraid she had thought him serious
about his wrathfulness, and went up to her. so that she was
obliged to look at him.

" What ! you think I'm a cross fellow at home, Dinah ? "
he said smilingly.

" Nay," said Dinah, looking up with timid eyes, " not so.
But you might be put about by finding things meddled with \
and even the man Moses, the meekest of men, was wrathful
sometimes."

" Come, then," said Adam, looking at her affectionately,
" I'll help you to move the things, and put 'em back again,
and then they can't get wrong. You're getting to be your
aunt's own niece, I see, for particularness."

They began their little task together, but Dinah had not
recovered lierself sufficiently to think of any remark, and
Adam looked at her uneasily. Dinah, he thought, had seemed
to disapprove him somehow lately ; she had not been so kind
and open to him as she used to be. He wanted her to look
at him, and be as pleased as he was himself with doing this
bit of playful work. But Dinah did not look at him ; it was
easy for her to avoid looking at the tall man ; and when at
last there was no more dusting to be done, and no farther ex-
cuse for him to linger near her, he could bear it no longer,
and said, in rather a pleading tone,

" Dinah, you're not displeased with me for anything, are
you ? I've not said or done anything to make you think ill
of me ? "

The question surprised her, and relieved her by giving a
new course to her feeling. She looked up at him now, quite
earnestly, almost with the tears coming, and said,

ADAM BEDE. 443

" Oh no Adam ! how could you think so ? "

"I couldn't bear you not to feel as much a friend to me
as I do to you," said Adam. " And you don't know the value
I set on the very thought of you, Dinah. That was what I
meant yesterday, when I said I'd be content for you to go, if
you thought right. I meant, the thought of you was worth so
much to me, I should feel I ought to be thankful, and not
grumble, if you see right to go away. You know I do mind
parting with you, Dinah t "

"Yes, dear friend," said Dinah, trembling, but trying to
speak calmly, " I know you have a brother's heart toward me,
and we shall often be with one another in spirit ; but at this
season I am in heaviness through manifold temptations : you
must not mark me. I feel called to leave my kindred for a
while; but it is a trial : the flesh is weak."

Adam saw that it pained her to be obliged to answer.

" I hurt you by talking about it, Dinah," he said : " I'll
say no more. Let's see if Seth's ready with breakfast now."

That is a simple scene, reader. But it is almost certain
that you, too, have been in love — perhaps, even, more than
once, though you may not choose to say so to all your lady
friends. If so you will no more think the slight words, the
timid looks, the tremulous touches, by which two human souls
approach each other gradually, like two quivering rain-streams,
before they mingle into one — you will no more think these
things trivial, than you will think the first-detected signs of
coming spring trivial, though they be but a faint, indescribable
spinething in the air and in the song of the birds, and the
tiniest perceptible budding on the hedgerow branches. Those
slight words and looks and touches are part of the soul's
language ; and the finest language, I believe, is chiefly made
up of unimposing words, such as " light," " sound," " stars,"
"music" — words really not worth looking at, or hearing, in
themselves, any more than "chips" or "sawdust; " it is only
that they happen to be the signs of something unspeakably
great and beautiful. I am of the opinion that love is a great
and beautiful thing too ; and if you agree with me, the small-
est signs of it will not be chips and sawdust to you : they will
rather be like those little words, " light" and "music," stirring
the long-winding fibres of your memory, and enriching your
present with your most precious past.

444 ADAM BEDE.

CHAPTER LI.

SUNDAY MORNING.

Lisbeth's touch of rheumaiism could not be made to ap-
pear serious enough to detain Dinah another night from ihe
Hall Farm, now she had made up her mind to leave her aunt
so soon ; and at evening the friends must part. " For a long
while," Dinah had said ; for she had told Lisbeth of her re-
solve.

" Then it'll be for all my life, an' I shall ne'er see thee
again," said Lisbeth. " Long while! I'n got no long while t'
live. An' I shall be took bad an' die, an' thee canst ne'er
come a-nigh me, an' I shall die a-longing for thee."

That had been the key-note of her wailing talk all day ;
for Adam was not in the house, and so she put no restraint
on her complaining. She had tried poor Dinah by returning
again and again to the question, why she must go away ? and
refusing to accept reasons which seemed to her nothing but
whim and " contrairiness ; " and still more, by regretting that
she " couldna ha' one o' the lads," and be her daughter.

"Thee couldstna put up wi' Seth," she said; "he isna
cliver enough for thee, happen ; but he'd ha' been very good
t' thee — he's as handy as can be at doin' things for me when
I'm bad ; an he's as fond o' th' Bible an' chapelin' as thee a't
thysen. But happen thee'dst like a husband better as isna
just the cut o' thysen : th' runnin' brook insa athirst for th'
rain. Adam 'ud ha' done for thee — I know he would ; an' he
might come t' like thee well enough if thee'dst stop. But he's
as stubborn as th' iron bar — there's no bendin' him no way
but's own. But he'd be a fine husband for anybody, be they
who they will, so looked-on an' so cliver as he is. And he'd
be rare an' lovin' : it does me good, on'y a look o' the lad's
eye, when he means kind tow'rt me."

Dinah tried to escape from Lisbeth's closest looks and
questions by finding little tasks of housework that kept her mov •
ing about ; and as soon as Seth came home in the evening, she
put on her bonnet to go. It touched Dinah keenly to say the
last good-by, and still more to look round on her way across
the fields, and see the old woman still standing at the door,
gazing after her till she must have been the faintest speck in
the dim aged eyes. " I'he God of love and peace be with

ADAM BSDE. 44^

them," Dinah prayed, as she looked back from the last stile.
"Make them glad according to the days wherein thou hast
afflicted them, and the years wherein they have seen evil. It
is thy will that I should part from them ; let me have no will
but thine."

Lisbeth turned into the house at last, and ^at down in the
workshop near Seth, who was busying himself there with
fitting some bits of turned \vood he had brought from the
village into a small work-box which he meant to give to Dinah
before she went away.

" Thee't see her again o' Sunday afore she goes," were her
first words. " If thee wast good for anything, thee'dst make
her come in agaiii o' Sunday night wi' thee, an' see me once
more."

" Nay, mother," said Seth, " Dinah 'ud be sure to come
again if she saw right to come. I should have no need to
persuade her. She only thinks it 'ud be troubling thee for
nought just to come in to say good-by over again."

" She'd ne'er go away, I know, if Adam 'ud be fond on
her an' marry her ; but everything's so contrairy," said
Lisbeth, with a burst of vexation.

Seth paused a moment, and looked up, with a slight blush,
at his mother's face. " What ! has she said anything o' that
sort to thee, mother ? " he said, in a low tone.

" Said ! nay, she'll say nothin'. It's on'y the men as have
to wait till folks say things afore they find 'em out. "

" Well, but what makes thee think so, mother ? What's
put it into thy head ? "

" It's no matter what's put it into my head : my head's
none so hollow as it must get in, an' nought to put it there.
I know she's fond on him, as I know the win's comin' in at
th' door, an' that's anoof. An' he might be willin' to marry
her if he know'd she's fond on him. but he'll ne'er think on't
if somebody doesna put it into's head."

His mother's suggestion about Dinah's feeling toward
Adam was not quite a new thought to Seth, but her last words
alarmed him, lest she should herself undertake to open Adam's
eyes. He was not sure about Dinah's feeling, and he thought
he was sure about Adam's.

" Nay, mother, nay," he said, earnestly, " thee mustna think
o' speaking o' such things to Adam. Thee'st no right to say
what Dinah's feelings are if she hasna told thee ; and it 'ud
do nothing but mischief to say such things to Adam : he feels
very grateful and affectionate toward Dinah, but he's no

446 ADAM BEDE.

thoughts toward her that' ud inclme him to make her his wife ;
and 1 don't believe Dinah 'ud marry him either. I don't think
she'll marry at all."

" Eh ! " said Lisbeth, impatiently. " Thee think'st so 'cause
she wouldna ha' thee. She'll ne'er marry thee ; thee might'st
as well like her to ha' thy brother."

Seth was hurt. " Mother," he said, in a remonstrating
tone, " don't think that of me, I should be as thankful t'
have her for a sister as thee wouldst t' have her for a daughter.
I've no more thoughts about myself in that thing, and I shall
take it hard if ever thee say'st it again."

" Well, well, then thee sliouldstna cross me wi' sayin' things
arena as I say they are."

" But, mother," said Seth, " thee'dst be doing Dinah a
wrong by telling Adam what thee think'st about her. It 'ud
do nothing but mischief ; for it 'ud make Adam uneasy if he
doesna feel the same to her. And I'm pretty sure he feels
nothing o' the sort."

" Eh ! donna tell me what thee't sure on ; thee know'st
nought about it. What's he allays goin' to the Poysers for, if
he didna vvantt' see her.-' He goes twice where he used t' go
once. Happen he knowsna as he wants t' see her ; he knowsna
as I put salt in's broth, but he'd miss it pretty quick if it
warna there. He'll ne'er think o' marr'in' if it isna put into's
head ; an' if thee'dst any love for thy mother, thee'dst put him
up to 't, an' not let her go away out o' my sight, when I might
ha' her to make a bit o' comfort for me afore I go to bed to
my old man under the white thorn."

"Nay, mother," said Seth, "thee mustna think me un-
kind ; but I should be going against my conscience if I took
upon me to say what Dinah's feelings are. And besides
that, I think I should give offence to Adam by speaking to
him at all about marrying • and I counsel thee not to do't.
Thee may'st be quite deceived about Dinah ; nay, I'm pretty
sure, by words she said to me last Sabbath, as she's no mind
to marry."

" Thee't as contrairy as the rest on 'em. If it war summat
I didna want it 'ud be done fast enough."

Lisbeth rose from the bench at this, and went out of the
workshop, leaving Seth in much anxiety lest she should dis-
turb Adam's mind about Dinah. He consoled himself after
a time with reflecting that, since Adam's trouble, Lisbeth had
been very timid about speaking to him on matters of feeling,
and that she would hardly dare to approach this tenderest of

ADAM BEDE. 44-

all subjects. Even if she did, he hoped Adam would not take
much notice of what she said.

Seth was right in believing that Lisbeth would be held in
restraint by timidity ; and during the next three days the in-
tervals in which she had an opportunity of speaking to Adam
were too rare and short to cause her any strong temptation.
But in her long solitary hours she brooded over her regretful
thoughts about Dinah, till they had grown very near that point
of unmanageable strength when thoughts are apt to take wing
out of their secret nest in a startling manner. And on Sunday
morning, when Seth went away to chapel at Treddleston, the
dangerous opportunity came.

Sunday morning was the happiest time in all the week to
Lisbeth ; for as there was no service at Hayslope church till
the afternoon, Adam was always at home, doing nothing but
reading, an occupation in which she couid venture to inter-
rupt him. Moreover, she had always a better dinner than
usual to prepare for her sons— very frequently for Adam and
herself alone, Seth being often away the entire day ; and
the smell of the roast-meat before the clear fire in the clean
kitchen, the clock ticking in a peaceful Sunday manner, her
darling Adam seated near her in his best clothes, doing
nothing very important, so that she could go and stroke her
hand across his hair if she liked, and see him look up at her
and smile, while Gyp, rather jealous, poked his muzzle up
between them— all these things made poor Lisbeth's earthly
paradise.

The book Adam most often read on a Sunday morning
was his large pictured Bible, and this morning it lay open be-
fore him on the round white deal table in the kitchen ; for he
sat there in spite of the fire, because he knew his mother
liked to have him with her, and it was the only day in the
^yeek when he could indulge her in that way. You would have
liked to see Adam reading his Bible ; he never opened it on
a week-day, and so he came to it as a holiday book, serving
him for histor3% biography, and poetry. He had one hand
thrust between his waistcoat buttons and the other ready to
turn the pages ; and in the course of the morning you would
have seen many changes in his fac'\ Sometimes his lips
moved in semi-articulation — it was when he came to a speech
that he could fancy himself uttering, such as Samuel's dying
speech to the people ; then his eyebrows would be raised^
and the corners of his mouth would quiver a little with sad
sympathy — something, perhaps old Isaac's meeting with

448 ADAM BEDE.

his son, touched him closely ; at other times, over the New
Testament, a very solemn look would come upon his face,
and he would every now and then shake his head in serious
assent, or just lift up his hand and let it fall again ; and,
on some mornings, when he read in the Apocrypha, of which
he was very fond, the son of Syrach's keen-edged words
would bring a delighted smile, though he also enjoyed the
freedom of occasionally differing from an Apocryphal writer.
For Adam knew the Articles quite well, as became a good
churchman.

Lisbeth, in the pauses of attending to her dinner, always
sat opposite to him and watched him, till she could rest no
longer without going up to him and giving him a caress, to
call his attention to her. This morning he was reading the
gospel according to St. Matthew, and Lisbeth had been
standing close by him for some minutes, stroking his hair,
which was smoother than usual this morning, and looking down
at the large page with silent wonderment at the mystery of
letters. She was encouraged to continue this caress, because
when she first went up to him, he had thrown himself back in
his chair to look at her affectionately and say, " Why, mother,
thee look'st rare and hearty this morning. Eh ! Gyp wants
me t' look at him ; he can't abide to think I love thee the
best." Lisbeth said nothing because she wanted to say so
so many things. And now there was a new leaf to be turned
over, and it was a picture — that of the angel seated on the
great stone that has been rolled away from the sepulchre.
This picture had one strong association in Lisbeth's memory,
for she had been reminded of it when she first saw Dinah ;
and Adam had no sooner turned the page and lifted the book
sidewavs that they might look at the angel, than she said,
" That's her— that's Dinah."

Adam smiled, and looking more intently at the angel's
face, said,

*' It is a. bit like her ; but Dinah's prettier, I think."

" Well, then, if thee think'st her so pretty, why ain't fond
on her?"

Adam looked up in surprise. " Why, mother, dost think
I don't set store by Dinah ? "

"Nay," said Lisbeth, frightened at her own courage, yet,
feeling that she had broken the ice, and the water must flow
whatever mischief they might do. " What's th' use o' settin'
store by things as are thirty mile off? If thee wast fond
enough on her, thee wouldstna let her go away ? "

ADAM BEDE. ^^m

"But I've no right t' hinder her, if she thinks well," said

Adam, looking at his book as if he wanted to go on reading.

He foresaw a series of complaints, tending to nothing.

Lisbeth sat down again in the chair opposite to him, as she

said,

" But she wouldna think well, if thee wastna so contrairy."
Lisbeth dared not venture beyond a vague phrase yet.

" Contrairy, mother ? " Adam said, looking up again i«
some anxiety. " What have I done .? What dost mean .? "

" Why, thee't never look at nothin', nor think o' nothin',
but thy figurin' an' thy work,"' said Lisbeth, half crying. " An'
dost think thee canst go on so all thy life, as if thee wast a
man cut out o' timber .? An' what wut do when thy mother's
gone, an' nobody to take care on thee as thee gett'st a bit o'
victual comfortable i' the mornin' } "

"What hast got i' thy mind, mother.?" said Adam, vexed
at this whimpering. " I canna see what thee't driving at. Is
there anything I could do for thee as I don't do ? "

^ •' Ay, an' that there is. Thee might'st do so as 1 should
ha somebody wi' me to comfort me a bit, an' wait on me when
I'm bad, an' be good to me."

_^ " Well, mother, whose fault is it there isna some tidy body
I th' house t' help thee ? It isna bv my wish as thee hast a
stroke o' work to do. We can afford it— I've told thee often
enough, It 'ud be a deal better for us."

"Eh! what's th' use o' talkin' o' tidv bodio?, when thee
mean^t one o' th' wenches out o' th' village, or somebody
from Treddles'on as I ne'er set eyes on i' my life ? I'd sooner
make a shift an' get into my coffin afore I die, nor ha' them
folks to put me in."

Adam was silent, and tried to go on reading. That was the
utmost severity he could show toward his mother on a Sunday
morning. But Lisbeth had gone too far now to check herself
and after scarcely a minute's quietness she began again.

^ " Thee might'st know well enough who 'tis I'd like t' ha'
wi me. It isna many folks I send for t' come an' see me, I
reckon. An' thee'st had the fetchin' on her rimes anoo."
<« u"^^^^ mean'st Dinah, mother, I know," said Adam.
But Its no use setting thy mind on what can't be. If
Dinah ud be willing to stay at Havslope, it isn't likely she
can come away from her aunt's iiouse, where they hold her
li.<e a daughter, and where she's more bound than she is to us.
It It had been so that she could ha' married Seth, that 'ud ha'
been a great blessing to us, but we can't have things just as we

450 'ADAM BEDE.

like in this life. Thee must try and make up thy mind to do
without her."

" Nay, but I canna ma' up my mind, when she's just cut
^ut for thee ; an' nought shall ma' me believe as God didna
make her an' send her there o' purpose for thee. What's it
sinnify about her bein' a Methody ? It 'ud happen wear out
on her wi' marryin'."

Adam threw himself back in his chair and looked at his
mother. He understood now what she had been aiming at from
the beginning of the conversation. It was as unreasonable,
impracticable a wish as she had ever urged, but he could noc
help being moved by so entirely new an idea. The chief point,
however, was to chase away the notion from his mother's mind
as quickly as possible.

•' Mother," he said, gravely, " thee't talking wild. Don't
let me hear thee say such things again. It's no good talking
o' what can never be. Dinah's not for marrying ; she's fixed
her heart on a different sort o' life."

"Very like," said Lisbeth, impatiently, "very like she's
none for marr'ing, when them as she'd be willin t' marry wcnna
ax her. I shouldna ha' been for marr'ing thy feytlici" ir he'd
ne'er axed me ; an' she's as fond o' thee as e'er I wat- o' Thias,
poor fellow."

The blood rushed to Adam's face, and for a few moments
he was not quite conscious where he was ; his ir.other and the
kitchen had vanished for him, and he saw nothir^g but Dinah's
face turned up toward his. It seemed as if thefi were a resur-
rection of his dead joy. But he woke up very speedily from
that dream (the waking was chill and sad) ; -tor it would have
been very foolish in him to believe liis momer's words : she
could have no ground for them. He was piompted to express
his disbelief very strongly — perhaps that he might call forth
the proofs, if there were any to be offered.

" What dost say such things for, moxher, when thee'st got
no foundation for 'em .-' Thee know'st nothing as gives thee
a right to say that."

" Then I knowna nought as gi'es me a right to say as th'
year's turned, for all I feel't fust thing when I get up i' th'
mornin'. She isna fond o' Seth, I reckon, is she ? She doesna
want t' marry him ? But I can see as she doe?na behave
tow'rt thee as she does tow'rt Seth. She makes no more o'
Seth's comin' a-nigh her nor if he war Gyp. but she's all of a
tremble when thee't a-sittin' down by her nt breakfast, an'a-
lookin' at her. Thee think'st thy mother knows nought, but
$be war alive afore thee wast born/'

ADAM BEDE. . - j

"But thee canstnabe sure as the trembling means love ? ''
said Adam, anxiously.

" Eh ! what else should it mane ? It isna hate, I reckon.
An' what should she do but love thee ? Thee't made to be
loved— for where's there a straighter, cliverer man ? An' what's
it sinnify her bein' a Methody ? It's on'y th' marigold i' th'
parridge," ^

_ Adam had thrust his Iiands in his pockets, and was look-
ing down at the book on the table, without seeing any of the
letters. He was trembling like a gold seeker, who sees the
strong promise of gold, but sees in the same moment a sick-
enmg vision of disappointment. He could not trust his
mother s insight ; she had seen what she wished to see. And
yet— and yet, now the suggestion had been made to him, he
remembered so many things, very slight things, like the stir-
ring of the water by an imperceptible breeze, which seemed
to him some confirmation of his mother's words.

Lisbeth noticed that he was moved. She went on.
" An' thee't find out as thee't poorly aff when she's gone.
Thee't fonder on her nor thee know'st. Thy eyes follow her
about welly as Gyp's follow thee."

Adam could sit still no longer. He rose, took down his hat,
and went out into the fields.

The sunshine was on them: that early autumn sunshine
which we should know was not summer's, even if there were
not the touches of yellow on the lime and chestnut ; the Sun-
day sunshine, too, which has more than autumnal calmness for
the working man : the morning sunshine, which still leaves
the dew-crystals on the fine gossamer webs in the shadow of
the bushy hedgerows.

Adam needed the calm influence ; he was amazed at the
way in which this new thought of Dinah's love had taken pos-
session of him, wiih an overmastering power that made all
other feelings give way before the impetuous desire to know
that the thought was true. Strange, that till that moment
the possibility of their ever being fovers had never crossed
his mind, and yet now all his longing suddenly went out tow-
ard that possibility ; he had no more doubt or hesitation as
to his own wishes than the bird that flies toward the opening
through which the daylight gleams and the breath of heaven
enters.

The autumnal Sunday sunshine soothed him ; but not by
preparing him with resignation to the disappointment if his
mother— if he Himself, proved to be mistaken about Dinah jit

^52 AJJAAI BEDE.

soothed him by gentle encouragement of his hopes. Her love
was so like that calm sunshine that they seemed to make one
presence to him, and he believed in them bodi alike. And
Dinah was so bound up with the sad memories of his first pas-
sion, that he was not forsaking them, but rather giving them a
new sacredness by loving her. Nay, his love for her had grown
out of that best ; it was the noon of that morning.

But Seth? Would the lad be hurt? Hardly; for he had
seemed quite contented of late, and there was no selfish jeal
ousy in him; he had never been jealous of his mother's fond-
ness for Adam. But had he seen anything of what their rnothei
talked about? Adam longed to know this, for he thought h<>
could trust Seth's observation better than his mother's. He:
must talk to Seth before he went to see Dinah; and, with thia
intention in his mind, he walked back to the cottage and said
to his mother:

"Did Seth say anything to thee abou. wlien he was com-
ing home? Will he be back to dinner?"

"Ay, lad; he'll be back, for a wonder. He isna gone to
Treddles'on. He's gone somewhere else a-preachin' an' a-
prayin'. "

"Hast any notion which way he's gone?" said Adam.

"Nay, but he aften goes to th' Common. Thee know'st
more o's goings nor I do."

Adam wanted to go and meet Seth, but he must content
himself wilh walking about the near fields and getting sight of
him as soon as possible. That would not be for more than an
hour to come, for Seth would scarcely be at home much before
their dinner-time, which waf. twelve o'clock. But Adam could
not sit down to his readmg again, and he sauntered along by
the brook and stood leaning against the stiles, with eager,
intense eyes, which locked as if they saw something very
vividly; but it was not the brook or the willows, not the fields
or the sky. Again and again his vision was interrupted by
wonder at the strength of his own feeling, at the strength and
sweetness of this now love — almost like the wonder man
feels at the added power he finds in himself for an art which
he had laid aside foi a space. How is it that the poets have
said so many fine things about our first love, so few about oui
later love? Are tWeir first poems the best? or are not those
the best which come from their fuller thought, their larger ex-
perience, their deeper-rooted affections? The boy's flute-like
voice has its own spring charm; but the man should yield 9
richer, deeper niusic.

ADAM SS3E.

453

At last, there was Seth, visible at the farthest stile, and
Adam hastened to meet him. Seth was surprised, and thought
something unusual must have happened ; but when Adam
came up, his face said plainly enough that it was nothing
alarming.

" Where hast been ? " said Adam, when they were side by
side.

" I've been to th' Common," said Seth. " Dinah's been
speaking the Word to a little company of hearers at Brim-
stone's, as they call him. They're folks as never go to church
hardlv — them on the Common — but they'll go and hear Dinah
a bit. She's been speaking with power this forenoon from the
words *I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repent-
ance.' And there was a little thing happened as was pretiy to
see. The women mostly bring their children with 'em, but to-
day there was one stout, curly-headed fellow, about three or four
year old, that I never saw there before. He was as naughty
as could be at the beginning, while I was praying, and while
we was singing, but when we all sat down and Dinah began to
speak, th' young un stood stock still all at once, and began to
look at her with's mouth open, and presently he ran away
from's mother and went up to Dinah, and pulled at her like a
little dog, for her to take notice of him. So Dinah lifted him
up and held th' lad on her lap, while she went on speaking;
and he was as good as could be till he went t' sleep — and the
mother cried to see him."

" It's a pity she shouldna be a mother herself," said Adam,
" so fond as the children are of her. Dost think she's quite
fixed against marrying, Seth ? Dost think nothing 'ud turn
her ? "

There was something peculiar in his brother's tone, which
made Seth steal a glance at his face before he answered.

" It 'ud be wrong of me to say nothing 'ud turn her,'' he an-
swered. " But if thee mean'st it about myself, I've given up
all thoughts as she can ever be ?ny wife. She calls me her
brother, and that's enough."

" But dost think she might ever get fond enough of any-
body else to be willing to marry 'em ? " said Adam, rather
shyly.

"Well," said Seth, after some hesitation, " it's crossed my
mind sometimes o' late as she might ; but Dinah 'ud let no
fondness for the creature draw her out o' the path as she be-
lieved God had marked out for her. If she thought the lead-
ing was not from Him, she's not one to be brought under the

454

ADAM BEDE.

power of it. And she's allays seemed clear about that, as her
work was to minister t' others, and make no home for herself
i' this world."

" But suppose," said Adam, earnestly, " suppose there was
a man as 'ucl let her do just the same and not interfere with
her — she might do a good deal o' what she does now just as
well when she was married as when she was single. Othei
women of her sort have married — that's to say, not just like
her, but women as preached and attended on the sick and
needy. There's Mrs. Fletcher as she talks of."

A new light had broken in on Seth. He turned round,
and laying his hand on Adam's shoulder, said, " Why, wouldst
like her to marry thee, brother ? "

Adam looked doubtfully at Seth's inquiring eyes, and said,
" Wouldst be hurt if she was to be fonder o' me than o' thee ? "

"Nay," said Selh, warmly, '' how canst think it ? Have I
felt thy trouble so little that I shouldna feel thy joy t "

Tliere was silence a few moments as they walked on, and
then Seth said,

" I'd no notion as thee'dst ever think of her for a wife."

" But is it o' any use to think of her ? " said Adam ; " what
dost say .'' Mother's made me as I hardly know where I am,
with what she's been saying to me this forenoon. She says
she's sure Dinah feels for me more than common, and 'ud be
willing t' have me. But I'm afraid she speaks without book.
I want to know if thee'st seen anything.-' "

" It's a nice point to speak about," said Seth, " and I'm
afraid o' being wrong ; besides, we've no right to intermeddle
with people's feelings when they wouldn't tell 'em themselves."

Seth paused.

" But thee might'st ask her," he said presently. " She took
no offense at meior asking ; and thee'st more right than I had,
only thee't not in the society. But Dinah doesn't hold wi'
them as are for keeping the society so strict to themselves.
She doesn't mind about making folks enter the society, so as
they're fit t' enter the kingdom o' God. Some o' the brethren
at Treddles'on are displeased with her for that."

" Where will she be the rest o' the day ? " said Adam.

" She said she shouldn't leave the farm again to-day," said
Seth, " because it's her last Sabbath there, and she's going t'
read out o' the big Bible wi' the children."

Adam thought — but did not say — " Then I'll go this after-
noon ; for if I go to church, m} •^houghts 'ull be with her all-
the while. They must sing th' antnem without me to-day."

A2JAM BED£. .--

455

CHAPTER LIT.

ADAM AND DINAH.

It was about three o'clock when Adam entered the farm-
yard, and roused Alick and the dogs from their Sunday
dozing. Alick said everybody was gone to church but "th'
young missis "—so he called Dinah ; but this did not disap-
pomt Atlam, although the " everybody " was so liberal as to
include Nancy, the dairymaid, whose works of necessity were
not unfrequently incompatible with church-goino-.

There was perfect stillness about the house ; the doors
were all closed, and the very stones and tubs seemed quieter
than usual. Adam heard the water gently dripping from the
pump— that was the only sound ; and he knocked at the
house door rather softly, as was suitable in that stillness.

The door opened, and Dinah stood before him, coloring
deeply with the great surprise of seeing Adam at this hour,
when she knew it was his regular practice to be at church.
Yesterday he would have said to her without any difficulty,
" I came to see you, Dinah : I knew the rest were not at
home." But to-day something prevented him from saying
that, and he put out his hand to her in silence. Neither of
them spoke, and yet both wished they could speak, as Adam
entered, and they sat down. Dinah took the chair she had
just left ; it was at the corner of the table near the window,
and there was a book lying on the table, but it was not open ;
she had been sitting perfectly still, looking at the small bit of
fire in the bright grate. Adam sat down opposite her in Mr.
Poyser's three-cornered chair.

" Your mother is not ill again, I hope, Adam," Dinah
remarked, recovering herself. " Seth said she was well this
morning."

" No, she's very hearty to-day," said Adam, happy in the
signs of Dinah's feeling at the sight of him, but shy.

I' There's nobody at home, you see," Dinah said ; " but
you'll wait. You've been hindered from going to church to-
day, doubtless."

"Yes," Adam said, and then paused, before he added, "I
was thinking about you ; that was the r^son."

456 .4DAAf BEDE.

This confession was very awkward and sudden, Adam felt,
for he thought Dinah must understand all he meant. But the
frankness of the words caused her immediately to interpret
them into a renewal of his brotherly regrets that she was going
away, and she answered camly,

" Do not be careful and troubled for me, Adam. I have
all things and abound at Snowfield, And my mind is at rest,
for I am not seeking my own will i i going."

"But if things were different, Dinah," said Adam, hesitat-
ingly— " if you knew things that perhaps you don't know
now " . . . .

Dinah looked at him inquiringly, but instead of going on,
he reached a chair and brought it near the corner of the table
where she was sitting. She wondered, and was afraid — and
the next moment her thoughts flew to the past ; was it some-
thing about those distant unhappy ones that she didn't know?

Adam looked at her ; it was so sweet to look at her eyes,
which had now a self-forgetful questioning in them — for a mo-
ment he forgot that he wanted to say anything, or that it was
necessary to tell her what he meant.

" Dinah," he said suddenly, taking both her hands be-
tween his, " I love you with my whole heart and soul. I love
you next to God who made me."

Dinah's lips became pale, like her cheeks, and she trem-
bled violently under the shock of painful joy. Her hands
were cold as death between Adam's. She could not draw
them away, because he held them fast.

" Don't tell me you can't love me, Dinah. Don't tell me
we must part, and pass our lives away from one another."

The tears was trembling in Dinah's eyes, and they fell be-
fore she could answer. But she spoke in a quiet, low voice.

"Yes, dear Adam, we must submit to another Will. We
must part."

"Not if you love me, Dinah — not if you love me," Adam
said, passionately. " Tell me — tell me if you can love ros bee-
ter than a brother."

Dinah was too entirely reliant on the Divine will Co at-
tempt to achieve any end by a deceptive concealment. Shai
was recovering now from the first shock of emotion, ai.d she
looked at Adam with simple sincere eyes as she said,

" Yes Adam, my heart is drawn strongly toward vou ; and
of my own will, if I had no clear showing to the contrary, I
could rind my happiness in being near you, and mir^steringto
you conblnually. I fear I should forget to rejoice and weep

ADAM BEDE. ..-

with others ; nay, I fear I should forget the Divine presence
and seek no love but yours." '

Adam did not speak immediately. They sat looking at each
other m delicious silence — for the first sense of mutual
love^excludes other feelings ; it will have the soul all to itself.

" Then, Dmah," Adam said at last, " how can there be anv
thing contrary to what's right in our belonging to one another
and spendmg our lives together.? Who put this ^reat love
into out hearts t Can anything be holier than that I For we
can ask God to be with us continually, and we'll help one
another in everything as is good. I'd never think o' putting
myself between you and God, and saving you oughtn't to do
this, and you oughtn't to do that. You'd follow your con-
science as much as you do now."

"Yes, Adam," Dinah said, "I know marriage is a kolv
state for those who are truly called to it, and have no other
drawing ; but from my childhood upward I have been led tow-
ard another path j all my peace and my joy have come from
haying no life of my own, no wants, no wishes for mvself and
living only in God and those of his creatures whose sorrows
and joys he has given me to know. Those have been very
blessed years to me, and I feel that, if I was to listen to any
voice that would draw me aside from that path, I should be
turning my back on the light that has shone upon me, and
darkness and doubt would take hold of me. We could not
bless each other, Adam, if there were doubts in my soul, and

u Jl^™^^' ^^^" ^^ ^^^ ^°° ^^^^' ^^^^^ that better part
which had once been given me and I had put away from me."

"But if a new feeling has come into your mind, Dinah
and if you love me so as to be willing to be nearer to me than
to other people, isn't that a sign that it's right for you to
change your life .? Doesn't the love make it right when noth-
ing else would .' "

"Adam, my mind is full of questionings about that • fot
now, since you tell me of your strong love toward me what
was clear to me has become dark again. I felt before that
my heart was too strongly drawn toward you, and that your
heart was not as mine ; and the thought of you had taken hold
of me, so that my soul had lost its freedom, and was becom-
ing enslaved to an earthly affection, which made me anxious
and careful about what should befall myself. For in all other
affection I had been content with any small return, or with
none j but my heart was beginning to hunger after an equal
love from you. And I had no doubt that I must wrestle

4S8 ADAAf BEDS.

against that as a great temptation ; and the command was
clear t^at i must go away."

" liut now, dear, dear Dinah, now you know I love you

better than you love me it's all different now. You

won't think o' going ; you'll stay, and be my dear wife, and I
shall thank God for giving me life as I never thanked him
before."

" Adam, it's hard to me to turn a deaf ear. . . . you
know it's hard ; but a great fear is upon me. It seems to me
as if you were stretching out your arms to me, and beckoning
me to come and take my ease, and live for my own delight,
and Jesus, the Man of Sorrows, was standing looking toward
me, and pointing to the sinful, and suffering, and afilicted, I
have seen that again and again when I have been sitting in
stillness and darkness, and great terror has come upon me
lest I should become hard, and a lover of self, and no more
bear willingly the Redeemer's cross."

Dinah had closed her eyes, and a faint shudder went
through her. •' Adam," she went on, "you wouldn't desire
that we shouHd seek a good through any unfaithfulness to the
light that is in us ; you wouldn't believe that could be a good.
We are of one mind in that."

" Yes, Dinah," said Adam, sadly, " I'll never be the man
t' urge you against your conscience. But I can't give up the
hope that you may come to see different. I don't believe
your loving me could shut up your heart ; it's only adding to
what you've been before, not taking away from it ; for it seems
to me it's the same with love and happiness as with sorrow —
the more we know of it the better we can feel what other
people's lives are or might be, and so we shall only be more
tender to 'em, and wishful to help 'em. The more knowledge
a man has the better he'll do's work ; and feeling's a sort o'
knowledge."

Dinah was silent ; her eyes were fixed in contemplation of
something visible only to herself. Adam went on presently
with his pleading :

" And you can do almost as much as you do now. I won't
ask you to go to church with me of a Sunday, you shall go
where you like among the people, and teach 'em ; for though
I like church best, I don't put my soul above yours, as if my
words was better for you t' follow than your own conscience.
And you can help the sick just as much, and you'll have more
means o' making 'em a bit comfortable ; and you'll be among
all your own friends as love you, and can help 'em, and be a

ADAM BEDE.

459

blessing to 'em, till their dying da3^ Surely, Dinah, you'd be
as near to God as if you were living lonely and away from
me."

Dinah made no answer for some time. Adam was still
holding her hands, and looking at her with almost trembling
anxiety, when she turned her grave, loving eyes on his, and
said in rather a sad voice,

" Adam, there is truth in what you say, and there's many
of God's servants who have greater strength than I have, and
find their hearts enlarged by the cares of husband and kindred.
But I have not faith that it would be so with me, for since
my aflfections have been set above measure on you, I have
had less peace and joy in God ; I have felt as it were a divis-
ion in my heart. And think how it is with me, Adam : that
life I have led is like a land I have trodden in blessedness
since my childhood ; and if I long for a moment to follow the
voice which calls me to another land that I know not, I can-
not but fear that my soul might hereafter yearn for that early
blessedness which I had forsaken : and where doubt enters,
there is not perfect love. I must wait for clearer guidance :
I must go from you, and we must submit ourselves entirely to
the Divine will. We are sometimes required to lay our nat-
ural, lawful affections on the altar."

Adam dared not plead again, for Dinah's was not the voice
of caprice or insincerity. But it was verj' hard for hiva ; his
eyes got dim as he looked at her.

" But you may come to feel satisfied .... to feel that you
may come to me again, and we may never part, Dinah ?

'^ We must submit ourselves, Adam. With time, our
duty will be made clear. It may be, when I have entered on
my former life, I shall find all these new thoughts and
wishes vanish, and become as things that were not. Then I
shall know that my calling is not toward marriage. But we
must wait.'*

"Dinah," said Adam, mournfully, "you can't love me so
well as I love you, else you'd have no doubts. But it's nat-
ural you shouldn't, for I'm not so good as you. I can't doubt
it's right for me to love the best thing God's ever given me
lo know."

" Nay, Adam ; it seems to me that my love for you is not
weak ; for my heart waits on your words and looks, almost as
a little child waits on the help and tenderness of the strong on
whom it depends. If the thought of you took slight hold of
me, 1 should not fear that it would be an idol in the temple.

460 ADAM BEDE.

But you will strengthen me — you will not hinder me in seek-
ing to obey to the uttermost."

" Let us go out into the sunshine, Dinah, and walk to-
gether. I'll speak no word to disturb you."

They went out, and walked toward the fields, where they
would meet the family coming from the church. Adam said,
"Take my arm, Dinah," and she took it. That was the only
change in their manner to each other since they were last
walking together. But no sadness in the prospect of her go-
ing away — in the uncertainty of the issue — could rob the
sweetness from Adam's sense that Dinah loved him. He
thought he would stay at the Hall Farm all that evening. He
would be near her as long as he could.

" Heyday ! there's Adam along wi' Dinah," said Mr. Poy-
ser, as he opened the far gate into the Home Close. " I
couldna think how he happened away from church. Why,"
added good Martin, after a moment's pause, " what dost
think has just jumped into my head .-• "

" Summat as hadna far to jump, for it's just under our
nose. You mean as Adam's fond o' Dinah."

" Ay ! hast ever had any notion of it before ? "

" To be sure I have," said Mrs. Poyser, who always de-
clined, if possible, to be taken by surprise. " I'm not one o'
those as can see the cat i' the dairy, an' wonder what she's
come after."

" Thee never saidst a word to me about it."

"Well, I aren't like a bird clapper, forced to make a rattle
when the wind blows on me. I can keep my own counsel
when there's no good i' speaking."

"But Dinah'll ha' none o' him : dost think she will ? "

" Nay," said Mrs. Poyser, not sufficiently on her guard
against a possible surprise ; " she'll never marry anybody if
he isn't a Methodist and a cripple."

" It 'ud ha' been a pretty thing, though, for 'em t' marry,"
said Martin, turning his head on one side, as if in pleased
contemplation of his new idea. " Thee'dst ha' liked it too,
wouldstna? "

" Ah ! I should. I should ha' been sure of her then, as
she wouldn't go away from me to Snowfield, welly thirty mile
ofif, and me not got a creature to look to, only neighbors, as
are no kin to me, an' most of 'em women as I'd be ashamed
to show my face if 7ny dairy things war like their'n. There
may well be streaky butter i' the market. An' I should be
glad to see the poor thing settled like a Christian woman,

ABAM BEDE. ^gl

with a house of her own over her head; and we'd stock her
well wi' linen and feathers, for I love her next to my own
children. An' she makes one feel safer when she's i' th'
house, for she's like the driven snow : anybody might sin for
two as had her at their elbow. "

"Dinah," said Tommy, running forward to meet her,
"mother says you'll never marry anybody but a Methodist
cripple. What a silly you must be!" a comment which
Tommy followed up by seizing Dmah with both arms, and
dancing along by her side with incommodious fondness.

"Why, Adam, we missed you i' the singing to-day," said
Mr. Poyser. "How was it?"

"I wanted to see Dinah; she's going away so soon," said
Adam.

"Ah, lad! can you persuade her to stop somehow? Find
her a good husband somewhere i' the parish. If you'll do
that, we'll forgive you for missing church. But, any way, she
isna going before the harvest-supper o' Wednesday, and you
must come then. There's Bartle Massey comin,' an' happen
Craig. You'll be sure an' come, now, at seven? The missis
wonno have it a bit later. "

"Ay," said Adam, "I'll come, if I can. But I can't often
say what I'll do beforehand, for the work often holds me
longer than I expect. You'll stay till th' end o' the week,
Dinah?"

II Yes, yes!" said Mr. Poyser; "we'll have no nay."

"She's no call to be in a hurry," observed Mrs. Poyser.
"Scarceness o' victual 'uU keep; there's no need to be hasty
wi' the cooking. An' scarceness is what there's the biggest
stock of i' that country,"

Dinah smiled, but gave no promise to stay, and they
talked on other things through the rest of the walk, Hngering
in the sunshine to look at the great flock of geese grazing, at .
the new corn-ricks, and at the surprising abundance of fruit
on the old pear-tree ; Nancy and Molly having already hast-
ened home, side by side, each holding, carefully wrapped in
her pocket-handkerchief, a prayer-book, in which she could
read little beyond the large letters and the Amens.

Surely all other leisure is hurry compared with a sunny
walk through the fields from "afternoon church"— as such
walks used to be in those old leisurely times, when the boat,
ghdmg sleepily along the canal, was the newest locomotive
wonder; when Sunday books had most of them old brown
leather covers, and^opened with remarkable precision always

462 ADAM BEDE.

in one place. Leisure is gone — gone where the spinning-
wheels are gone, and the pack-horses, and the slow wagons,
and the pedlers who brought bargains to the door on sunny
afternoons. Ingenious philosophers tell you, perhaps, that
the great work of the steam-engine is to create leisure for
mankind. Do not believe them ; it only creates a vacuum
for eager thought to rush in. Even idleness is eager foi
amusement ; prone to excursion-trains, art museums, periodi-
cal kterature, and exciting novels ; prone even to scientific
theorizing, and cursory peeps through microscopes. Old Lei-
sure was quite a different personage ; he only read one news-
paper, innocent of leaders, and was free from that periodicity
of sensations which we call post-time. He was a contempla-
tive, rather stout gentleman, of excellent digestion — of quiet
perceptions, undiseased by hypothesis ; happy in his inability
to know the causes of things, preferring the things themselves.
He lived chiefly in the country, among pleasant seats and
homesteads, and was fond of sauntering by the fruit-tree wall,
and scenting the apricots when they were warmed by the
morning sunshine, or of sheltering himself under the orchard
boughs at noon, when the summer pears were falling. He
knew nothing of week-day services, and thought none the
worse of the Sunday sermon if it allowed him to sleep from
the text to the blessing — liking the afternoon service best,
because the prayers were the shortest, and not ashamed to
say so ; for he had an easy, jolly conscience, broad-backed
like himself, and able to carry a great deal of beer or port
wine — not being made squeamish by doubts and qualms and
lofty aspirations. Life was not a task to him, but a sinecure ;
he fingered the guineas in his pocket, and ate his dinners,
and slept the sleep of the irresponsible ; for had he not kept
up his charter by going to church on the Sundav afternoon ?

Fine old Leisure ! Do not be severe upon him, and judge
him by our modern standard ; he never went to Exeter Hall,
or heard a popular preacher, or read Tracts for the 2'tmes, 01
Sartor Resartus.

ADAAJ £££)£■ 463

CHAPTER LIII.

THE HARVEST SUPPER.

As Adam was going homeward, on Wednesday evening, in
the six o'clock sunUght, he saw in the distance the last load
of barley winding its way toward the yard gate of the Hall
Farm, and heard the chant of "Harvest Home!" rising and
sinking like a wave. Fainter and fainter, and more musical
through the growing distance, the tailing, dying sound still
reached him, as he neared the Willow Brook. The low west-
ering sun shone right on the shoulders of the old Binton
Hills, turning the unconscious sheep into bright spots of
light; shone on the windows of the cottage, too, and made
them a-flame with a glory beyond that of amber or amethyst.
It was enough to make Adam feel that he was in a great tem-
ple, and that the distant chant was a sacred song.

"It's wonderful," he thought, "how that sound goes to
one's heart almost like a funeral bell, for all it tells one o' the
joyfulest time o' the year, and the time when men are mostly
the thankfulest. I suppose it's a bit hard to us to think any-
thing's over and gone in our lives; and there's a parting at
the root of all our joys. It's like what I feel about Dinah; I
should never ha' come to know that her love 'ud be the great-
est of blessings to me, if what I counted a blessing hadn't
been wrenched and torn away from me, and left me with a
greater need, so as I could crave and hunger for a greater
and a better comfort."

He expected to see Dinah again this evening, and get leave
to accompany her as far as Oakbourne; and then he would
ask her to fix some time when he might go to Snowfield, and
learn whether the last best hope that had been born to him
must be resigned hke the rest. The work he had to do at
home, besides putting on his best clothes, made it seven before
he was on his way again to the Hall Farm, and it was question
able whether, with his longest and quickest strides, he should
be there in time even for the roast beef which came after the
plum-pudding; for Mrs. Peyser's supper would be punctual.

Great w^as the clatter of knives and pewter plates and tin
cans when Adam entered the house-place, but there was no

464 A3 AM £££>£.

hum of voices to this accompaniment; the eating of excellent
roast beef, provided free of expense, was too serious a business
to those good farm-laborers to be performed with a divided
attention, even if they had had anything to say to each other
— which they had not; and Mr. Poyser, at the head of the
table, was too busy with his carving to listen to Bartle Massey's
or Mr, Craig's ready talk.

" Here, Adam," said Mrs. Poyser, who was standing and

looking on to see that Molly and Nancy did their duty as

waiters, "here's a place kept for you between Mr. Massey

_and the boys. It's a poor tale you couldn't come to see the

pudding when it was whole."

Adam looked anxiously round for a fourth woman's
figure; but Dinah was not there. He was almost afraid of
asking about her; besides, his attention was claimed by greet-
ings, and there remained the hope that Dinah was in the
house, though perhaps disinclined to festivities on the eve of
her departure.

It was a goodly sight — that table, with Martin Peyser's
round, good-humored face and large person at the head of it,
helping his servants to the fragrant roast beef, and pleased
when the empty plates came again. Martin, though usually
blest with a good appetite, really forgot to finish his own beef
to-night — it was so pleasant to him to look on in the intervals of
carving, and see how the others enjoyed their supper; for were
they not men who, on all the days of the year except Christ-
mas-day and Sundays, ate their cold dinner, in a make-shift
manner, under the hedgerows, and drank their beer out of
wooden bottles — with relish certainly, but with their mouths
toward the zenith, after a fashion more endurable to ducks than
to human bipeds? Martin Poyser had some faint conception
of the flavor such men must find in hot roast beef and fresh-
drawn ale. He held his head on one side, and screwed up his
mouth, as he nudged Bartle Massey, and watched half-witted
Tom Tholer, otherwise known as "Tom Saft," receiving his
second plateful of beef. A grin of delight broke over Tom's
face as the plate was set down before him, between his knife
and fork, which he held erect, as if they had been sacred tapers;
but the delight was too strong to continue smouldering in a
grin — it burst out the next instant in along-drawn "haw, haw!"
followed by a sudden collapse into utter gravity, as the knife
and fork darted down on the prey. Martin Peyser's large
person shook with his silent, unctuous laugh; he turned to-
ward Mrs. Poyser to see if she, too, had been observant of

ADAM BEBE. 465

Tom, and the eyes of husband and wife met in a glance of
good-natured amusement,

" Tom Saft " was a great favorite on the farm, where he
played the part of the old jester, and made up for his practical
deficiencies by his success in repartee. His hits, I imagine,
were those of the flail, which falls quite at random, but never-
theless smashes an insect now and then. They were much
quoted at sheep-shearing and hay-making times ; but I refrain
from recording them here, lest Tom's wit should prove to be
like that of many other by-gone jesters eminent in their day
— rather of a temporary nature, not dealing with the deeper
and more lasting relations of things,

Tom excepted, Martin Poyser had some pride in his ser-
vants and laborers, thinking with satisfaction that they were
the best worth their pay of any set on the estate. There was
Kester Bale, for example (jBeale, probably, if the truth were
known, but he was called Bale, and was not conscious of any
claim to a fifth letter) — the old man with the close leather cap,
and the net-work of wrinkles on his sun-browned face. Was
there any man in Loamshire who knew better the " natur " of
all farming work ? One of those invaluable laborers who can-
not only turn their hand to everything, but excel in everything
they turn their hand to. It is true, Kester's knees were much
bent outward by this time, and he walked with a perpetual cour-
tesy, as if he were among the most reverent of men. And so
he was ; but I am obliged to admit that the object of his rever-
ence was his own skill, toward which he performed some
rather affecting acts of worship. He always thatched the ricks ;
for if anything were his forte more than another, it was thatch-
ing ; and when the last touch had been put to the last bee-
hive rick, Kester, whose home lay at some distance from the
farm, would take a walk to the rick-yard in his best clothes on
a Sunday morning, and stand in the lane, at a due distance, to
contemplate his own thatching — walking about to get each rick
from the proper point of view. As hecourtesied along, with his
eyes upturned to the straw knobs imitative of golden globes
at the summits of the bee-hive ricks, which, indeed, were gold
of the best sort, you might have imagined him to be engaged
in some pagan act of adoration. Kester was an old bachelor,
and reputed to have stockings full of coin, concerning which
his master cracked a joke with him every pay-night ; not a new,
unseasoned joke, but a good old one, that had been tried many
times before, and had worn well. " Th' young measter's a
merry mon," Kester frequently remarked ; for having begun,

4.66 ADAM BEDS.

his career by frightening away the crows under the last Martin
Poyser but one, he could never cease to account the reigning
Martin a young master. I am not ashamed of commemorat-
ing old Kester ; you and I are indebted to the hard hands of
such men — hands that have long ago mingled with the soil they
tilled so faithfully, thriftily making the best they could of the
earth's fruits and receiving the smallest share as their own
wages.

Then, at the end of the table, opposite his master, there
was Alick, the shepherd and head man, with the ruddy face
and broad shoulders, not on the best terms with old Kester ;
indeed, their intercourse was confined to an occasional snarl,
for though they probably differed little concerning hedging
and ditching and the treatment of ewes, there was a profound
difference of opinion between them as to their own respective
merits. When Tityrus and Meliboeus happen to be on the
same farm, they are not sentimentally poliie to each other.
Alick, indeed, was not by any means a honeyed man : his
speech had usually something of a snarl in it, and his broad-
shouldered aspect something of the bull-dog expression —
" Don't meddle with me, and I won't meddle with you ;" but
he was honest even to the splitting of an oat-grain rather than
take beyond his acknowledged share, and as " close-fisted "
with his master's property as if it had been his own — throw-
ing very small handfuls of damaged barley to the chickens,
because a large handful affected his imagination painfully with
a sense of profusion. Good-tempered Tim, the wagoner, who
loved his horses, had his grudge against Alick in the niattar
of corn : they rarely spoke to each other, and never looked
at each other, even over their dish of cold potatoes ; but then,
as this was their usual mode of behavior toward all mankind,
it would be an unsafe conclusion that they had more tha»
transient fits of unfriendliness. The bucolic character at Hay-
slope, you perceive, was not of that entirely genial, merry,
broad-grinning sort, apparently observed in most districts
visited by artists. The mild radiance of a smile was a rare
sight on a field-laborer's face, and there was seldom any grada-
tion between bovine gravity and a laugh. Nor was every
laborer so honest as our friend Alick. At this very table,
among Mr. Poyser's men, there is that big Ben Tholoway, a
very powerful thresher, but detected more than once in carry-
ing away his master's corn in his pockets : an action which,
as Ben was not a philosopher, could hardly be ascribed to ab-
sence of mir.d. Kowever, his master had forgiven him, and

ADAM BEDS. 467

continued to employ him ; for the Tholoways had lived on the
Common time out of mind, and had always worked for the
Poysers. And on the whole, I dare say, society was not much
the worse because Ben had not six months of it at the tread-
mill ; for his views of depredation were narrow, and the House
of Correction might have enlarged them. As it was, Ben ate
his roast beef to-night with a serene sense of having stolen
nothing more than a few peas and beans, as seed for his gar-
den, since the last harvest-supper, and felt warranted in think-
ing that Alick's suspicious eye, forever upon him, was an in-
jury to his innocence.

But 7WZU the roast beef was finished and the cloth was
drawn, leaving a fair large deal table for the bright drinking-
cans, and the foaming brown jugs, and the bright brass candle-
sticks, pleasant to behold. Now, the great ceremony of the
evening was to begin — the harvest song, in which every man
must join : he might be in tune, if he liked to be singular, but
he must not sit with closed lips. The movement was obliged
to be in triple time ; the rest was ad libitum.

As to the origin of this song — whether it came in its actual
state from the brain of a single rhapsodist, or was gradually
perfected by a school or succession of raphsodists, I am igno-
rant. There is a stamp of unity, of individual genius, upon
it, which inclines me to the former hypothesis, though I am
not blind to the consideration that this unity may rather have
arisen from that consensus of many minds which was a con-
dition of primitive thought, foreign to our modern conscious-
ness. Some will perhaps think that they detect in the first
quatrain an indication of a lost line, which later rhapsodists,
failing in imaginative vigor, have supplied by the feeble device
of iteration : others, however, may rather maintain that this
very iteration is an original felicity, to which none but the
most prosaic minds can be insensible.

The ceremony connected with the song was a drinking
ceremony. (Tha't is perhaps a painful fact, but then, you
know, we can not reform our forefathers.) During the first
and second quatrain, sung decidedly /tfr/<?, no can was filled.

" Here's a health unto our master,
The founder of the feast ;
Here's a health unto our master
And to our mistress !

" And may his doings prosper
Whate'er he takes in hand.
For we are all his servants,
And are at bis command.''

46S ADAM BSDE.

But now, immediately before the third quatrain or chorus,
snng fortissimo, with emphatic raps of the table, which gave
the effect of cymbals and drum together, Alick's can was
filled, and he was bound to empty it before the chorus ceased.

" Then drink, boys, drink 1
And see ye do not spill.
For if ye do, ye shall drink two,
For 'tis our master's will.

When Alick had gone successfully through this test of
steady-handed manliness, it was the turn of old Kester, at his
right hand — and so on, till every man had drunk his initiatory
pint under the stimulus of the chorus. Tom Saft — the rogue
— took care to spill a little by accident ; but Mrs. Poyser
(too officiously, Tom thought,) interfered to prevent the ex-
action of the penalty.

To any listener outside the door it would have been the
reverse of obvious why the " Drink, boys, drink ! " should
have such an immediate and often-repeated encore ; but once
entered, he would have seen that all faces were at present
sober, and most of them serious ; it was the regular and re-
spectable thing for those excellent farm-laborers to do, as much
as for elegant ladies and gentlemen to smirk and bow over
their wine-glasses. Bartle Massey, whose ears were rather
sensitive, had gone out to see what sort of evening it was, at
an early stage in the ceremony ; and had not finished his con-
templation until a silence of five minutes declared that " Drink,
boys, drink ! " was not likely to begin again for the next
twelve-month. Much to the regret of the boys and Totty : on
them the stillness fell rather flat, after that glorious thumping
on the table, toward which Totty, seated on her father's knee,
contributed with her small might and small fist.

When Bartle re-entered, however, there appeared to be a
general desire for solo music after the choral. Nancy declared
that Tim the wagoner knew a song, and was " allays singing
like a lark i' the stable ;" whereupon Mr. Poyser said encour-
agingly, " Come, Tim, lad, let's hear it." Tim looked sheep-
ish, tucked down his head, and said he couldn't sing ; but
this encouraging invitation of the master's was echoed all
round the table ; it was a conversational opportunity ; every-
body could say " Come, Tim," except Alick, who never re-
laxed into the frivolity of unnecessary speech. At last Tim's
next neighbor, Ben Tholoway, began to give emphasis to his
speech by nudges, at which Tim, growing rather savage, said,

ADAM BEDE. 469

" Let me alooan, wJll ye ? else I'll ma' ye sing a toon ye wonna
like." A good-tempered wagoner's patience has limits, and
Tim was not to be urged farther.

" Well, then, David, ye're the lad to sing," said Ben, will-
ing to show that he was not discomfited by this check. " Sing
' M' loove's a roos wi'out a thorn.' "

The amatory David was a young man of an unconscious
abstracted expression, which was due probably to a squint of
superior intensity rather than to any mental characteristic ;
for he was not indifferent to Ben's invitation, but blushed,
and laughed, and rubbed his sleeve over his mouth in a way
that was regarded as a symptom of yielding. And for some
time the company appeared to be much in earnest about the
desire to hear David's song. But in vain. The lyrism of the
evening was in the cellar at present, and was not to be drawn
from that retreat just yet.

Meanwhile the conversation at the head of the table had
taken a political turn. Mr. Craig was not above talking poli-
tics occasionally, though he piqued himself rather on a wise
insight than on specific information. He saw so far beyond
the mere facts of a case, that really it was superfluous to know
them.

" I'm no reader o' the paper myself," he observed to-night,
as he filled his pipe, "though I might read it fast enough if I
liked, for there's Miss Lyddy has 'em, and's done with 'em i'
no time ; but there's Mills, now, sits i' the chimney-corner and
reads the paper pretty nigh from morning to night, and when
he's got to th' end on't he's more addle-headed that he was at
the beginning. He's full o' this peace now, as they talk on ;
he's been reading and reading, and thinks he's got to the bot-
tom on't. 'Why, Lor' bless you. Mills,' savs I, 'you see no
more into this thing nor you can see into the middle of a po-
tato. I'll tell you what it is : you think it'll be a fine thing
for the country ; and I'm not again' it — mark my words— I'm
not again' it. But it's my opinion as there's them at th' head
o' this country as are worse enemies t' us nor Bony and all
the mounseers he's got at's back ; for as for the mounseers,
you may skewer half a dozen of 'em at once as if they war
frogs.' " ^

" Ay, ay," said Martin Poyser, listening with an air of
much intelligence and edification, " they ne'er ate a bit o' beef
i' their lives. Mostly sallet, I reckon."

" And says I to Mills." continued Mr. Craio-, " ' will you
try to make me believe as furriners like them can do us halt

470 ADAM BEDS.

th' harm them ministers do with their bad government ? If
King George 'ud turn 'em all away and govern by himself,
he'd see everything righted. He might take on Billy Pitt
again if he liked ; but I don't see myself what we want wi'
anybody besides king and Parliament. It's that nest o' min-
isters does the mischief, I tell you.'"

" Ah ! it's fine talking," observed Mrs. Poyser, who was
now seated near her husband, with Tolty on her lap — " it's
fine talking. It's hard work to tell which is Old Harry when
everybody's got boots on."

" As for this peace," said Mr. Poyser, turning his head on
one side in a dubitative manner, and giving a precautionary
puff to his pipe between each sentence, "I don't know. Th'
war's a fine thing for the country, an' how'll you keep up
prices wi'out xO. An' them French are a wicked sorto' folks,
by what I can make out ; what can you do better n %x
fight 'em ? "

" Ye're partly right there, Poyser," said Mr. Craig, " but
I'm not again' the peace — to make a holiday for a bit. We
can break it when we like, an' I'jn in no fear o' Bony, for all
they talk so much o' his cliverness. That's what I says to
Mills this morning. Lor' bless you, he sees no more through
Bony ! . . . why, I put him up to more in three minutes than
he gets from's paper all the year round. Says I, ' Am I a
gardener as knows his business, or aren't I, Mills .'' answer me
that.' ' To be sure y' are, Craig,' says he— he's not a bad
fellow, Mills isn't for a butler, but weak i' th' head. 'Well,'
says I, ' you talk o' Bony's cliverness ; would it be any use
my being a first-rate gardener if I'd got nought but a quagmire
to work on .^ ' ' No,' says he. ' W^ell,' I says, ' that's just whal
it is wi' Bony. I'll not deny but he may be a bit cliver — he's
no Frenchman born, as I understand ; but what's he got at's
back but mounseers .-' ' "

Mr. Craig paused a moment with an emphatic stare after
this triumphant specimen of Socratic argument, and then
added, thumping the table rather fiercely.

" WHiy, it's a sure thing — and there's them 'ull bear witness
to't — as i' one regiment where there was one man a-missing,
they put the regimentals on a big monkey, and they fit him as
the shells fits the walnut, and you couldn't tell the monkey
from the mounseers ! "

" Ah ! think o' that now ! " said Mr. Poyser, impressed at
once with the political bearings of the fact, and with its strik-
ing interest as an anecdote in natural history.

ADAM BEDE. 471

"Come, Craig," said Adam, "that's a little too strong.
You don't believe that. It's all nonsense about the French
being such poor sticks. Mr. Irwine's seen 'em in their own
country, and he says they've plenty o' fine fellows among 'em.
And as for knowledge, and contrivances, and manifactures,
there's a many things as v/e're a fine sight behind 'em in. It's
poor foolishness to run down your enemies. Why, Nelson and
the rest of 'em 'ud have no merit i' beating 'em if they were
such offal as folks pretend."

Mr. Poyser looked doubtfully at Mr. Craig, puzzled by
this opposition of authorities. Mr. Irwine's testimony was
not to be disputed ; but, on the other hand, Craig was a know-
ing fellow, and his view was less startling. Martin had never
" heard tell '' of the French being good for much. Mr. Craig
had found no answer but such as was implied in taking a long
draught of ale, and then looking down fixedly at the propor-
tions of his own leg, which he turned a little outward for that
purpose, when Bartle Massey returned from the fireplace,where
he had been smoking his first pipe in quiet, and broke the
silence by saying, as he thrust his forefinger into the canister,

" Why, Adam, how happened you not to be at church on
Sunday ? answer me that, you rascal. The anthem went limp-
ing without you. Are you going to disgrace your schoolmaster
in his old age ? "

" No, Mr. Massey," said Adam, " Mr. and Mrs. Poyser can
tell you where I was. I was in no bad company."

" She's gone, Adam, gone to Snowfield," said Mr. Poy-
ser, reminded of Dinah for the first time this evening. " I
thought you'd ha' persuaded her better. Nought 'ud hold her
but she must go yesterday forenoon. The missis has hardly
got over it. I thought she'd ha' no sperrit for th' harvest
supper."

Mrs", Poyser had thought of Dinah several times since
Adam had come in, but she had had •* no heart " to mention
the bad news.

" What ! " said Bartle, with an air of disgust. " Was there
a woman concerned ? Then I give you up, Adam."

" But it's a woman you'n spoke well on, Bartle," said Mr.
Poyser. " Come, now, you canna draw back ; you said once
as women wouldna ha' been a bad invention if they'd all been
like Dinah."

" I meant her voice, man — I meant her voice, that was all,"
said Bartle. "I can bear to hear her speak without wanting
to put wool in my ears. As for othei things, I dare say she's

472 ADAM BEVE.

like the rest o' the women — thinks two and two'U come to
make five, if she cries and bothers enough about it ."

" Ay, ay ! " said Mrs. Poyser ; " one 'ud think, an' hear some
folks talk, as the men war 'cute enough to count the corns in
a bag o' wheat wi' only smelling at it. They can see through
a barn door, they can. Perhaps that's the reason they can see
so little o' this side on't."

Martin Poyser shook with delighted laughter, and winked
at Adam, as much as to say the schoolmaster was in for it
now.

"Ah ! " said Bartle, sneeringly, " the women are quick
enough — they're quick enough. They know the rights of a
story before they hear it, and can tell a man what his thoughts
are before he knows 'em himself."

" Like enough," said Mrs. Poyser ; " for the men are
mostly so slow, their thoughts overrun 'em, an' they can only
catch 'em by the tail. I can count a stocking-top while a
man's getting's tongue ready ; an' when he outs wi' his speech
at last, there's little broth to be made on't. It's your dead
chicks take the longest hatchin'. However, I'm not denyin'
the women are foolish : God Almighty made 'em to match
the men."

" Match ! " said Bartle ; " ay, as vinegar matches one's
teeth. If a man says a word, his wife'll match it with a con-
tradiction \ if he's a mind for hot meat, his wife '11 match it
with cold bacon ; if he laughs, she'll match him with whim-
pering. She's such a match as th' horse-fly is to th' horse :
she's got the right venom to sting him with — the right venom
to sting him with."

" Yes," said Mrs. Poyser, " I know what the men like — a
poor soft, as 'ud simper at 'em like the pictur o' the sun,
whether they did right or wrong, an' say thank you for a kick,
an' pretend she didna know which end she stood uppermost,
till her husband told her. That's what a man wants in a
wife, mostly ; he wants to make sure o' one fool as '11 tell him
he's wise. But there's some men can do wi'out that — they
think so much o' themselves a'ready ; an' that's how it is
there's old bachelors."

" Come, Craig," said Mr. Poyser, jocosely, " you mun
get married pretty quick, else you'll be set down for an old
bachelor ; an' you see what the women '11 think on you."

"Well," said Mr. Craig, willing to conciliate Mrs. Poyser,
and setting a high value on his own compliments, "/like a
cleverish woman — a woman o' sperrit — a managing woman."

ADAM BEDE. y-

You're out there, Craig," said Bartle, dryly; 'S-ou're
out there. You judge o' you garden-stuff on a' belter plan
than that : you pick the things for what they can excel in— for
what they can excel in. You don't value your peas for their
roots, or your carrots for their flowers. Xow that's the wav
you should choose women : their cleverness '11 never come to
much— never come to much ; but they make excellent sim-
pletons, ripe, and strong-flavored."

"What dost say to that .?" said Mr. Poyser, throwintr
himself back and looking merrily at his wife. "^

" Say ! " answered Mrs. Poyser, with dangerous fire kind-
ling in her eye ; *' why, I say as some folks' tongues are like
the clocks as run on strikin', not to tell you the time o' the day,
but because there's summat worng i' their own inside "...

Mrs. Poyser would probably have brought her rejoinder' to
a farther climax, if every one's attention had not at this moment
been called to the other end of the table where the lyrism
which had at first only manifested itself by ly^xx^'s soft o voce
performance of " My love's a rose without a thorn," had grad-
ually assumed a rather deafening and complex character.
Tim, thinking slightly of David's vocalization, was compelled
to supersede that feeble buzz by a spirited commencement
of '• Three Merry ]\f owers ; " but David was not to be put down
so easily, and showed himself capable of a copious crescendo
which was rendering it doubtful whether the rose would not
predominate over the mowers, when old Kester, with an
entirely unmoved and immovable aspect, suddenly set up a
quavering treble— as if he had been an alarum, and the time
was come for him to go off.

The company at Alick's end of the table took this form of
vocal entertainment very much as a matter of course, beino-
free from musical prejudices ; but Bartle Massev laid down his
pipe and put his fingers in his ears ; and Adam^vho had been
longing to go, every since he had heard Dinah was not in the
house rose, and said he must bid good-night.

" I'll go with you, lad," said Bartle ; " I'll go with you be-
fore my ears are split."

" ril go round by the Common, and .see you home, if you
like,Mr. Massey," said Adam.

" Ay, ay," said Bartle ; " then we can have a bit o' talk to-
gether. I never get hold of you now."

" Eh I it's a pity but you'd sit it out," said Martin Povser.
" They'll all go soon ; for th' missis niver let's 'em stay ^past

474 ADAM BEDE.

But Adam was resolute, so the good-nights were said, and
the two friends turned out on their star-light walk together.

" There's that poor fool, Vixen, whimpering for me at home,"
said Bartle. " I can never bring her here with me for fear she
should be struck with Mrs. Poyser's eye, and the poor bitch
might go Imiping forever after."

" I've never any need to drive Gyp back," said Adam,
laughing. " He always turns back of his own heed when he
finds out I'm coming nere."

" Ay, ay ! " said Bartle. " A terrible woman ! made of nee-
dles— made of needles. But I stick to Martin — I shall always
stick to Martin. And he likes the needles, God help him !
He's a cushion made on purpose for 'em."

" But she's a downright good-natured woman for all that,"
said Adam, " and as true as the daylight. She's a bit cross
wi' the dogs when they offer to come in th' house, but if they
depended on her, she'd take care and have 'em well fed. If
her tongue's keen, her heart's tender : I've seen that in times
o' trouble. She's one o' those women as are better than their
word."

" Well, well," said Bartle, " I don't say th' apple isn't
sound at the core ; but it sets my teeth on edge — it sets my
teeth on edge."

CHAPTER LIV.

THE MEETING ON THE HILL.

Adam understood Dinah's haste to go away, and drew hope
rather than discouragement from it. She was fearful lest the
Strength of her feeling toward him should hinder her from wait-
ing and listening faithfully for the ultimate guiding voice from
within.

" I wish I'd asked her to write to me, though," he thought.
"And yet even tliat might disturb her a bit, perhaps. She
wants to be quite quiet in her old way for a while. And I've
no right to be impatient and interrupting her with my wishes.
She's told me what her mind is ; and she's not a woman to say
one thing and mean another. I'll wait patiently."

That was Adam's wise resolution, and it throve excellentlj

ADAM fiKDE.

475

for the first two or three weeks on the nourishment it got
from the remembrance of Dinah's confession that Sunday after-
noon. There is a wonderful amount of sustenance in the first
few words of love. But toward the middle of October the
resolution began to dwindle perceptibly, and showed danger-
ous symptoms of exhaustion. The weeks were unusually long :
Dinah must surely have had more than enough time to make up
her mind. Let a woman say what she will after she has once
told a man that she loves him, he is a little too flushed and exalt-
ed with that first draught she offers him to care much about the
taste of the second : he treads the earth with a very elastic step
as he walks away from her, and makes light of all difficulties.
But that sort of glow dies out ; mem ory gets sadly diluted with
time, and is not strong enough to revive us. Adam was no
longer so confident as he had been : he began to fear that per-
haps Dinah's old life would have too strong a grasp upon her
for any new feeling to triumph. If she had not felt this, she
would surely have written to him to give him some comfort ;
but it appeared that she held it right to discourage him. As
Adam's confidence waned, his patience waned with it and he
thought he must write himself; he must ask Dinah not to
leave him in painful doubt longer than was needful. He sat
up late one night to write her a letter, but the next morning
he burned it, afraid of its effect. It would be worse to have a
discouraging answer by letter than from her own lips, for her
presence reconciled him to her will.

You perceive how it was ; Adam was hungering for the sight
of Dinah ; and when that sort of hunger reaches a certain
stage, a lover is likely to still it though he may have to put
his future in pawn.

But what harm could he do by going to Snowfield ? Dinah
could not be displeased with him for it ; she had not forbid-
den him to go ; she must surely expect that he would go be-
fore long. By the second Sunday in October this view of the
case had become so clear to Adam, that he was already on
his way to Snowfield ; on horseback this time, for his hours
were precious now, and he had borrowed Jonathan Burge's
good nag for the journey.

What keen memories went along the road with him ! He
had often been to Oakbourne and back since that first jour-
ney to Snowfield, but beyond Oakbourne, the gray stone walls,
the broken country, the meagre trees, seemed to be telling
him afresh the story of that painful past which he knew so
well by heart. But no story is the same to us after a lapse

476 ADAM BEDS.

of time ; or rather, we who read it are no longer Che same In-
terpreters ; and Adam this morning brought with him new
thoughts through that gray country — thoughts which gave an
altered significance to its story of the past.

That is a base and selfish, even a blasphemous, spirit, which
rejoices and is thankful over the past evil that has blighted or
crushed another, because it has been made a source of unfore-
seen good to ourselves ; Adam could never cease to mourn
over that mystery of human sorrow which had been brought
so close to him ; he could never thank God for another's mis-
ery. And if I were capable of that narrow-sighted joy in
Adam's behalf, I should still know he was not the man to
feel it for himself ; he would have shaken his head at such a
sentiment, and said, " Evil's evil, and sorrow's sorrow, and
you can't alter its natur by wrapping it up in other words.
Other folks were not created for my sake, that I should think
all square when things turn out well for me."

But it is not ignoble to feel that the fuller life which a sad
experience has brought us is worth our own personal share of
pain ; surely it is not possible to feel otherwise, any more than
it would be possible for a man with cataract to regret the pain-
ful process by which his dim, blurred sight of men as trees
walking had been exchanged for clear outline and effulgent
day. The growth of higher feeling within us is like the growth
of faculty, bringing with it a sense of added strength ; we can
no more wish to return to a narrower sympathy, than a
painter or a musician can wish to return to his <?ruder man-
ner, or a philosopher to his less complete formula.

Something like this sense of enlarged being was in Adam's
mind this Sunday morning, as he rode along in vivid recollec-
tion of the past. His feeling towards Dinah, the hope of pass-
ing his life with her, had been the distant unseen point toward
which that hard journey from Snowfield eighteen months ago
had been leading him. Tender and deep as his love for Hetty
had been — so deep that the roots of it would never be torn
away — his love for Dinah was better and more precious to him;
for it was the outgrowth of that fuller life which had come to
him from his acquaintance with deep sorrow. " It's like as if
It was a new strength to me," he said to himself, " love her,
and know as she loves me. I shall look t' her to help me to
see things right. For she's better than I am — there's less o'
self in her and pride. And it's a feeling as gi\es you a sort
o' liberty, as if you could walk more fearless, when you've
more trust in another, then y'have in yourself. I've always

ADAM BEDE, 477

been thinking I knew better than them as belonged to me, and
that' a poor sort o' life, when you can't look to them nearest
to you t' help you with a bit better thought than what you've
got mside you a'ready."

It was more than two o'clock in the afternoon when Adam
came m sight of the gray town on the hill-side, and looked
earchingly toward the green valley below for the first glimpse
of the old thatched roof near the ugly red mill. The scene
looked less harsh in the soft October sunshine than it had
done in the eager time of early spring ; and the one grand
chance it possessed in common with all wide-stretching wood-
less regions — that it filled you with a new consciousness of
the overarching sky — had a milder, more soothing influence
than usual on this almost cloudless day. Adam's doubts and
fears melted under this influence as the delicate web-like
clouds has gradually melted away into the clear blue above
him. He seemed to see Dinah's gentle face assuring him,
with its looks alone, of all he longed to know.

He did not expect Dinah to be at home at this hour, but
he got down from his horse and tied it at the little gate, that
he might ask where she was gone to-day. He had set his
mind on following her and bringing her home. She was gone
to Sloman's End, a hamlet about three miles off, over the hill,
the old woman told him : had set off directly after morning
chapel, to preach in a cottage there, as her habit was. Any
body at the town would tell him the way to Sloman's End.
So Adam got on his horse again and rode to the town, put-
ting up at the old inn, and taking a hasty dinner there in the
company of the too chatty landlord, from whose friendly ques-
tions and reminiscences he was glad to escape as soon as pos-
sible, and set out toward Sloman's End. With all his haste, it
was nearly four o'clock before he could set off, and he thought
that as Dinah had gone so early, she would, perhaps, already be
near returning. The little gray, desolate-looking hamlet, un-
screened by sheltering trees, lay in sight long before he reach-
ed it ; and, as he came near, he could hear the sound of
voices singing a hymn. " Perhaps that's the last hymn before
they come away," Adam thought ; " I'll walk back a bit, and
turn again to meet her farther off the village. He walked
back till he got nearly to the top of the hill again, and seated
himself on a loose stone against the low wall, to watch till
he should see the little black figure leaving the hamlet and
winding up the hill. He chose this spot, almost at the top of
the hill, because it was away from all eyes — no house, no

^yg AD A AT BEDS.

cattle, not even a nibbling sheep near — no presence but the
still lights and shadows, and the great embracing sky.

She was much longer coming than he expected : he waited
an hour at least, watching for her and thinking of her, while
the afternoon shadows lengthened, and the light grew softer.
At last he saw the little black figure coming from between
the gray houses, and gradually approaching the foot of the
hill. Slowly, Adam thought ; but Dinah was really walking
at her usual pace, with a light quiet step. Now she was be-
ginning to wind along the path up the hill, but Adam would
not move yet : he would not meet her too soon : he had set his
heart on meeting her in this assured loneliness. And now he
began to fear lest he should startle her too much ; " Yet," he
thought, " she's not one to be overstartled ; she's always so
calm and quiet, as if she was prepared for anything."

What was she thinking of as she wound up the hill .■* Per-
haps she had found complete repose without him, and had
ceased to feel any need of his love. On the verge of a decision
we all tremble : hope pauses with fluttering wings.

But now at last she was very near, and Adam rose from
the stone wall. It happened that, just as he walked forward,
Dinah had paused and turned round to look back at the vil-
lage ; who does not pause and look back in mounting a hill }
Adam was glad ; for, with the fine instinct of a lover, he felt
that it would be best for her to hear his voice before she saw
him. He came within three paces of her, and then said, " Di-
nah ! " She started without looking round, as if she connect-
the sound with no place. " Dinah ! " Adam said again. He
knew quite well what was in her mind. She was so accustomed
to think of impressions as purely spiritual monitions, that
she looked for no material visible accompaniment of the voice.

But this second time she looked round. What a look of
yearning love it was that the mild gray eyes turned on the
strong dark-eyed man ! She did not start again at the sight
of him ; she said nothing, but moved toward him so that his
arm could clasp her round.

And they walked on so in silence, while the warm tears
fell. Adam was content, and said nothing. It was Dinah
who spoke first.

" Adam," she said, " it is the Divine Will. My soul is so
knit to yours that it is but a divided life I live without you.
And this moment, now you are with me, and I feel that our
hearts are filled with the same love, I have a fullness of

ADAM BSDE.

479

strength to o«ar and do our heavenly Father's will, that I
had lost before."

Adam paused and looked into her sincere, loving eyes.

" Then we'll never part any more, Dinah, till death parts
OS."

" And they kissed each other with a deep joy.

What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to
feel that they are joined for life — to strengthen each other in
all labor, to rest on each other in all scrrow, to minister
to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent
unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting ?

CHAPTER LV.

MARRIAGE BELLS.

In little more than a month after that meeting on the
hill — on a rimy morning in departing November — Adam and
Dinah were married.

It was an event much thought of in the village. All Mr.
Burge's men had a holiday, and all Mr. Poj^ser's ; and most of
those who had a holiday appeared in their best clothes at the
wedding. I think there was hardly an inhabitant of Hayslope
specially mentioned in this history and still resident in the par-
ish on this November morning, who was not either in church to
see Adam and Dinah married, or near the church door to greet
them as they came forth. Mrs. Irwine and her daughters were
waiting at the church-yard gates in their carriage (for they had
a carriage now ) to shake hands with the bride and bridegroom
and wish them well ; and in the absence of Miss Lydia Donni-
thorne at Bath, Mrs. Best, Mr. Mills, and Mr. Craig had felt it
incumbent on them to represent " the family " at the Chase on
the occasion. The church-yard walk was quite lined with famil-
iar faces, rnany of them faces that had first looked at Dinah
when she preached on the Green ; and no wonder they showed
this eager interest on her marriage morning, for nothing like
Dinah and the history which had brought her and Adam Bede
together had been-known at Hayslope within the memoi:v of
man.

Sassy Cranage, in her neatest cap and frock, was crj'ing,

480 ADAM BEDS.

though she did not exactly know why ; for, as her cousin Wiry
Ben, who stood near her, judiciously suggested/ Dinah was not
going away, and if Bessy was in low spirits, the best thing for
her to do was to follow Dinah's example, and marry an honest
fellow who was ready to have her. Next to Bessy, just with
in the church door, there were the Poyser children, peeping
round the corner of the pews to get a sight of the mysterious,
ceremony ; Totty's face wearing an unusual air of anxiety at
the idea of seeing cousin Dinah come back looking rather old-
for in Totty's experience no married people were young.

I envy them all the sight they had when the marriage was
fairly ended and Adam led Dinah out of the church. She
was not in black this morning : for her aunt Poyser would by
no means allow such a risk of incurring bad luck, and had her
self made a present of the wedding dress, made all of gray
though in the usual Quaker form, for on this point Dinah could
not give way. So the lily face looked out with sweet gravity
from under a gray Quaker bonnet, neither smiling nor blushing
but with lips trembling a little under the weight of solemn,
feelings. Adam, as he pressed her arm to his side, walked
with his old erectness and his head thrown rather backward
as if to face all the world better, but it was not because he was
particularly proud this morning, as is the wont of bridegrooms,
for his happiness was of a kind that had little reference to
men's opinion of it. There was a tinge of sadness in his deep
joy ; Dinah knew it, and did not feel aggrieved.

There were three other couples, following the bride and
bridegroom : first, Martin Poyser, looking as cheery as a bright
fire on this rimy morning, led quiet Mary Burge, the brides-
maid ; then came Seth, serenely happy, with Mrs. Poyser on his
arm ; and last of all Bartle Massey, with Lisbeth — Lisbeth
in a new gown and bonnet, too busy with her pride in her son,
and her delight in possessing the one daughter she had de-
sired, to devise a single pretext for complaint.

Bartle Massey had consented to attend the wedding at
Adam's earnest req-uest, under protest against marriage in gen-
eral, and the marriage of a sensible man in particular. Never-
theless, Mr. Poyser had a joke against him after the wedding
dinner, to the effect that in the vestry he had given the bride
one more kiss than was necessary.

Behind this last couple came Mr. Irwine, glad at heart over
this good morning's work of joining Adam and Dinah. For
he had seen Adam in the worst moments of his sorrow ; and
what better harvest from that painful seed-time could there be

ADAM BEDE.

48 1

than this ? The love that had brought hope and comfort in
the hour of despair, the love that had found its way to the dark
prison cell and to poor Hetty's darker soul — this strong,
gentle love was to be Adam's companion and helper till death.

There was much shaking of hands mingled with " God
bless you's," and other good wishes to the four couples, at the
churchyard gate, Mr. Poyser answering for the rest with un-
wonted vivacity of tongue, for he had all the appropriate wed
ding-day jokes at his command. And the women, he observed,
could never do anything but put finger in eye at a wedding.
Even Mrs. Poyser could not trust herself to speak, as the
neighbors shook hands with her ; and Lisbeth began to cry in
the face of the very first person who told her she was getting
young again.

Mr. Joshua Rann, having a slight touch of rheumatism,
did not join ^ in the ringing of the bells this morning, and,
looking on with some contempt at these informal greetings
which required no official co-operation from the clerk, began
to hum in his musical bass, " Oh, what a joyful thing it is ,"by
way of preluding a little to the effect he intended to produce
in the wedding psalm next Sunday.

" That's a bit of good news to cheer Arthur," said Mr. Ir-
wine to his mother, as they drove off. " I shall write to him
the first thing when we get home."

EPILOGUE.

It IS near the end of June, in 1807. The workshops have
been shut up half an hour or more in Adam Bede's timber-yard,
which used to be Jonathan Purge's, and the mellow evening
light is falling on the pleasant house with the buff walls and
the soft gray thatch, very much as it did when we saw Adam
bringing in the keys on that June evening nine years ago.

There is a figure we know well, just come out of the house,
and shading her eyes with her hands as she looks for some-
thing in the distance ; for the rays that fall on her white
borderless cap and her pal eauburn hair are very dazzling.
But now she turns away from the sunlight and looks toward
the door. We can see the sweet pale face quite well now ;
it is scarcely at all altered — only a little fuller, to correspond

-+82 ADA.\f BEDE.

to her more matronly figure, which still seems light and
active enough in the plain black dress.

"I see him, Seth," Dinah said, as she looked into
the house. "Let us go and meet him. Come, Lisbeth,
come Avith mother."

The last cali was answered immediately by a small, fair
creature with pale auburn hair and gray eyes, little more
than four years old, who ran out silently and put her hand
into her mother's.

" Come, uncle Seth," said Dinah.

"Ay, ay, we're coming," Seth answered from within
anu 1^ o-^ently appeared stooping under the doorway, being
taller than usual by the black head of a sturdy two-year-old
nephew, who had caused some delay by demanding to be
caried on uncle's shoulder.

*' Better take him on thy arm, Seth," said Dinah, looking
fondly at the stout black-eyed fellow. " He's troublesome to
thee so."

" Nay, nay ; Addy likes a ride on my shoulder. I can
carry him so for a bit." A kindness which Addy acknowledged
by drumming his heels with promising force against uncle
Seth's chest. But to walk by Dinah's side, and be tyrannized
over by Dinah and Adam's children, was uncle Seth's earthly
happiness.

" Where didst see him ? " asked Seth, as they walked on
into the adjoining field " I can't catch sight of him any-
where."

" Between the hedges by the roadside," said Dinah. " I
saw his hat and his shoulder. There he is again."

" Trust thee for catching sight of him if he's anywhere to
be seen," said Seth, smiling. " Thee't like poor mother
used to be. She was always on the look-out for Adam, and
could see him sooner than other folks, for all her eyes got
dim."

" He's been longer than he expected," said Dinah, taking
Arthur's watch from a small side pocket and looking at it ;
" it's nigh upon seven now."

" Ay, they'd have a deal to say to one another," said Seth,
" and the meeting 'ud touch'em both pretty closish. Why,
U's getting on towards eight year since they parted."

'* Yes,'* said Dinah, " Adam was greatly moved this morn-
ing at the thought of the change he should see in the poor
young man, from the sickness he has undergone, as well as the
years which have changed us all. And the death of the poc»

ADAM BEDE. ^g,

wanderer, when she was coming ],ack to us, has been sor-
row upon sorrow."

" See,Adcly," said Seth, lowering the young one to his arm
now, and pointing,"there's father\^oraing— atthefar stile."

Dinah hastened her steps, and little Lisbeth ran on at her
utmost speed till she clasped her father's leg. Adam patted
her head and lifted her up to kiss her. but Dinah could see the
marks of agitation on his face as she approached him, and he
put her arm within his in silence.

" Well, youngster, must I take you ? " he said, trying to
smile, when Addy stretched out his arms— ready, with' the
usual baseness of infancy, to give up his uncle Seth at once,
now there was some rarer patronage at hand.

" It's cut me a good deal, Dinah," Adam said at last,
when they were walking on.

^' Didst find him greatly altered .? " said Dinah.

" Why, he's altered and yet not altered. I should ha'
known him anywhere. But his color's changed, and he looks
sadly. However, the doctors say he'll soon be set right in
his own country air. He's all sound in th' inside j it's only the
fever shattered him so. But he speaks just the same,' and
smiles at me just as he did when he was a lad. It's wonder-
ful how he's always had just the same sort o' look when he
smiles."

''^Fve never seen him smile, poor young man," said Dinah.

" But thee will see him smile, to-morrow," said Adam
" He asked after thee the first thing when he bagan to come
round, and we could talk to one another. ' I hope she isn't
altered,' he said, ' I remember her face so well.' I told him"
' no,' " Adam continued, looking fondly at the eyes that were
turned up toward his, " only a bit plumper, as thee'dst a right
to be after seven year. ' I may come and see her to-morrow,
mayn't I ? ' he said ; ' I long to tell her how I've thought of
her all these years.' "

" Didst tell him I'd always used the watch } " enquired
Dinah.

"Ay; and we talked a deal about thee, for he says be
never say a woman a bit like thee. ' I shall turn Methodist
some day," he said, ' when she preaches out of doors, and go
to hear her.' And I said, ' Nay, sir, you can't do that, for
Conference tas forbid the women preachmg, and she's given
It up, all but talking to the people a bit in their houses, "

'• Ay ! " said Seth, who could not repress a comment on
this point, " and a sore pity it was o' Conference j and if Dinah

4S4 ADAM BEDE.

had seen as I did, we'd ha' left the Wesleyans and' joined a
body that 'ud put no bonds on Chirstian liberty."

" Nay, lad, na}'^," said Adam, " she was right and thee
wast wrong. There's no rule so wise but what it's a pity for
somebody or other. Most o' the women do more harm nor
good with their preaching : they've not got Dinah's gift nor
her sperrit ; and she's seen that, and she thought it right to
set th' example o' submitting, for she's not held from other
sorts o' teaching. And I agree with her, and approve o'
what she did."

Seth was silent. This vi^as a standing subject of difference
rarely alluded to, and Dinah, wishing to quit it at once, said,

" Didst remember, Adam, to speak to Colonel Donni-
t4iorne the words my uncle and aunt intrusted to thee ? "

" Yes ; and he's going to the Hall Farm with Mr. Irwine
the day after to-morrow. Mr. Irwine came in while we were
talking about it, and he would have it as the Colonel must see
nobody but thee to-morrow : he said — and he's in the right of
it — as it'll be bad for him t' have his feelings stirred with see-
ing many people one after another. ' We must get you strong
and heart}^' he said, ' that's the first thing to be done, Arthur,
and then you shall have your own way. But I shall keep you
under your old tutor's thumb till then.' Mr. Irwine's fine and
joyful at having him home again."

Adam was silent a little while, and then said :

" It was very cutting when we first saw one another.
He'd never heard about poor Hetty till Mr. Irwine met him
in London, for the letters missed him on his journey. The
first thing he said to me, when we'd got hold o' one another's
hands, was, ' I could never do anything for her, Adam — she
lived long enough for all the suffering — and I'd thought so of
the time when I might do something for her. But you told
me the truth when you said to me once, ' There's a sort of
wrong that can never be made up for.' "

" Why, there's Mr. and Mrs. Foyser coming in at the
yard gate," said Seth.

" So there is," said Dinah. " Run, Lisbeth, run to meet
Aunt Poyser. Come in, Adam, and rest \ it has been a hard
day for thee."

THE END.

RO M O LA.

GEORGE ELIOT.

NEW EDITION— COMPLETE IN ONE VOL UME.

NEW YORK:

JOHN B. ALDEN.

1884.

CONTENTS

PAGE

Proem 5

BOOK I.

Chap.

I. The Shipwrecked Stranger 13

II. A Breakfast for Love 26

III. The Barber's Shop 31

IV. First Impressions 43

V. The Blind Scholar and his Daughter - - - 45

VI. Dawning Hopes 59

VII. A Learned Squabble 74

VIII. A Face in the Crowd 80

IX. A Man's Ransom 92

X. Under the Plane-Tree - 100

XI. Tito's Dilemma Ill

XII. The Prize is Nearly Grasped .... 115

XIII. The Shadow of Nemesis 127

XIV. The Peasants' Fair - - - - - - 134

XV. The Dying Message 148

XVI. A Florentine Joke 157

XVII. Under the Loggia 170

XVIII. The Portrait 176

XIX. The Old Man's Hope 182

XX. The Day of the Betrothal 186

BOOK II.

XXI. Florence Expects a Guest 196

XXH. The Prisoners 203

XXIII. After-Thoughts 211

XXIV. Inside the Duomo 214

XXV. Outside the Duomo 220

XXVI. The Garment of Fear 235

XXVII. The Young Wife 230

XXVIII. The Painted Record 240

XXIX. A Moment of Triumph 245

XXX. The Avenger's Secret 252

XXXI. Fruit is Seed 261

XXXII. A Revelation - 266

XXXIII. BaldassaiTC Makes an Acquaintance - - - 376

4 C0XTE2\IS.

PAGE

XXXIV. No Place for Repentance 284

XXXV. What Florence was Thinking of - - - - 295

XXXVI. Ariadne Discrowns Herself .... 299

XXXVII. The Tabernacle Unlocked 309

XXXVIII. The Black Marks Become Magical - - - 313

XXXIX. A Supper in the Rucellai Gardens - - - - 330

XL. An Ari-esting Voice 836

XLI. Coming Back 344

BOOK III.

XLII. Romola in her Place 348

XLIII. The Unseen Madonna 355

XLIV. The Visible Madonna 361

XLV. At the Barber's Shop 367

XLVI. By a Street Lamp 376

XLVII. Check - 384

XLVIII. Counter-Check 387

XLIX. The Pyramid of Vanities 393

L. Tessa Abroad and at Home 399

LI. Monna Brigida's Conversion .... 409

LII. A Prophetess 414

LIII. On San Miniato 420

LIV. The Evening and the Morning .... 425

LV. Waiting ^ 429

LVI. The Other Wife 433

LVn. Why Tito was Safe 435

LVIII. A Final Understanding 449

LIX. Pleading ........ 455

LX. The Scaffold - - - 464

LXI. Drifting Away 470

LXII. The Benediction 475

LXIII. Ripening Schemes 479

LXIV. The Prophet in his Cell 490

LXV. The Trial by Fire 498

LXVI. A Mask of the Furies 506

LXVII. Waiting by the River 510

LX\^III. Romola's Waking 516

LXIX. Homeward 526

LXX. Meeting Again 529

LXXI. The Confession 584

LXXII. The Last Silence 540

Epilogue 543

KOMOLA.

PROEM.

MoEE than three centuries and a half ago, in the mid
spring-time of 1492, we are sure that the angel of the
dawn, as he traveled with broad slow wing from the Levant
to the Pillars of Hercules, and from the summits of the
Caucasus across all the snowy Alpine ridges to the dark
nakedness of the Western isles, saw nearly the same out-
line of firm land and unstable sea — saw the same great
mountain shadows on the same valleys as he has seen
to-day — saw olive mounts, and pine forests, and the broad
plains green with young corn or rain-freshened grass — saw
the domes and spires of cities rising by the river-sides or
mingled with the sedge-like masts on the many-curved
sea-coast, in the same spots where they rise to-day. And
as the faint light of his course pierced into the dwellings
of men, it fell, as now, on the rosy warmth of nestling
children; on the haggard waking of sorrow and sickness:
on the hasty uprising of the hard-handed laborer; and on
the late sleep of the night-student, who had been ques-
tioning the stars or the sages, or his own soul, for that
hidden knowledge Avhich would break through the barrier
of man's brief life, and show its dark path, that seemed
to bend no whither, to be an arc in an immeasurable circle
of light and glory. The great river-courses which have
shaped the lives of men have hardly changed; and those
other streams, the life-currents that ebb and flow in human
hearts, pulsate to the same great needs, the same great
loves and terrors. As our thought follows close in the
slow wake of the dawn, we are impressed with the broad
sameness of the human lot, which never alters in the main
headings of its history — hunger and labor, seed-time and
harvest, love and death.

Even if, instead of following the dim daybreak, our
imagination pauses on a certain histoi-ical spot and awaits

6 BOMOLA.

the fuller morning, we may see a world-famous city, which
has hardly changed its outline since the days of Columbus,
seeming to stand as an almost unviolated symbol, amidst
the flux of human things, to remind us" that we still
resemble the men of the past more than we differ from
them, as the great mechanical princii)les on which those
domes and towers were raised must make a likeness in
human building that will be broader and deeper than all
possible change. And doubtless, if tiic spirit of a Floren-
tine citizen, whose eyes were closed for the last time while
Columbus was still waiting and arguing for the three poor
vessels with which he was to set sail from the port of
Palos, could return from the shades and i)ause where our
thought is pausing, he would believe that there must
still be fellowship and understanding for him among the
inheritors of his birthplace.

Let us suppose that sucli a Shade luis b'xii permitted to
revisit the glimpses of the golden morning, and is standing
once more on the famous hill of San Miniato, which over-
looks Florence from the south.

The Spirit is clothed in his habit as he lived: the folds
of his well-lined black silk garment or lucco hang in grave
unbroken lines from neck to ankle; his plain cloth cap,
with its becclietto, or long hanging strip of drapery, to serve
as a scarf in case of need, surmounts a penetrating face,
not, perhaps, very handsome, but with a firm, well-cut
mouth, kept distinctly human by a close-shaven lip and
chin. It is a face charged with memories of a keen and
various life passed below there on the banks of the gleam-
ing river; and as he looks at the scene before him. the
sense of familiarity is so much stronger than the percep-
tion of change, that he thinks it might be possible to
descend once more amongst the streets, and take up that
busy life where he left it. For it is not only the moun-
tains and the westward-bending river that he recognizes;
not only the dark sides of Mount Morello opposite to him,
and the long valley of the Arno that seems to stretch its
gray low-tufted luxuriance to the far-off ridges of Carrara;
and the steep height of Fiesole, with its crown of monastic
walls and cypresses; and all the green and gray slopes
sprinkled with villas which he can name as he looks at
them. He sees other familiar objects much closer to his
daily walks. For though he misses the seventy or more
towers that once surmounted the walls, and encircled the
city as with a regal diadem^ his eyes will not dwell on that

PROEM. 7

blank; they are drawn irresistibly to the unique tower
springing, like a tall flower-stem "^drawn toward the sun,
from the square turreted mass of the Old Palace in the
very heart of the city — the tower that looks none the
worse for the four centuries that have passed since he used
to walk under it. The great dome too, greatest in the
world, which, in his early boyhood, had been only a
daring thought in the mind of a small, quick-eyed man
— there it raises its large curves still, eclipsing the hills.
And the well-known bell-towers — Giotto's, with its dis-
tant hint of rich color, and the graceful-spired Badia,
and the rest — he looked at them all from the shoulder
of his nurse.

''Surely," he thinks, "Florence can still ring her bells
with the solemn hammer-sound that used to beat on the
hearts of her citizens and strike out the fire there. And
here, on the right, stands the long dark mass of Santa
Croce, where we buried our famous dead, laying the laurel
on their cold brows and fanning them with the breath of
praise and of banners. But Santa Croce had no spire
then: we Florentines were too full of great building proj-
ects to carry them all out in stone and marble; we had
our frescoes and our shrines to pay for, not to speak of
rapacious condottieri, bribed royalty, and purchased ter-
ritories, and our fa9ades and spires must needs wait. But
what architect can the Frati Minori* have employed to
build that spire for them ? If it had been built in my
day, Filippo Brunelleschi or Michelozzo would have
devised something of another fashion than that — some-
thing worthy to crown the church of Arnolfo."

At this the Spirit, with a sigh, lets his eyes travel onto the
city walls, and now he dwells on the change there with
wonder at these modern times. Why have five out of the
eleven convenient gates been closed? And why, above all,
should the towers have been leveled that were once a glory
and defense? Is the world become so peaceful, then, and
do Florentines dwell in such harmony, that there are no
longer conspiracies to bring ambitious exiles home again
with armed bands at their back? These are difficult ques-
tions: it is easier and pleasanter to recognize the old than
to account for the new. And there flows Arno, with its
bridges Just where they used to be — the Ponte Yecchio,
least like other bridges in the world, laden with the same
quaint shops where our Spirit remembers lingering a little

*Tbe Franciscans.

8 KOMOLA.

on his way perhaps to look at the progress of that great
palace which Messer Luca Pitti had set a building with
huge stones got from the Hill of Bogoli * close behind, or
perhaps to transact a little business with the cloth-dressers
in Oltrarno. The exorbitant line of the Pitti roof is hidden
from San Miniato; but the yearning of the old Florentine
is not to see Messer Luca's too ambitious palace which he
built unto himself; it is to be down among those narrow
streets and busy humming Piazze where he inherited the
eager life of his fathers. Is not the anxious voting with
black and white beans still going on down there? Who
are the Priori in these months, eating soberly -regulated
official dinners in the Palazzo Vecchio, with removes of
tripe and boiled partridges, seasoned hj practical Jokes
against the ill-fated butt among those potent signors? Are
not the significant banners still hung from the windows —
still distributed with decent pomp under Orcagna's Loggia
eVfery two months?

Life had its zest for the old Florentine when he, too, trod
the marble stej)s and shared in those dignities. His poli-
tics had an area as wide as his trade, which stretched from
Syria to Britain, but they had also the passionate intensity,
and the detailed practical interest, which could belong
only to a narrow scene of corporate action; only to the
members of a community shut in close by the hills and by
walls of six miles' circuit, where men knew each other as
they passed in the street, set their eyes every day on the
memorials of their commonwealth, and were conscious of
having not simply the right to vote, but the chance of
being voted for. lie loved his honors and his gains, the
business of his counting-house, of his guild, of the public
council-chamber; he loved his enmities too, and fingered
the white bean which was to keep a hated name out of the
bo7:'ia with more complacency than if it had been a golden
florin. He loved to strengthen his family by a good
alliance, and went home with a triumphant light in his eyes
after concluding a satisfactory marriage for his son or
daughter under his favorite loggia in the evening cool; he
loved his game at chess under that same loggia, and his
biting jest, and even his coarse joke, as not beneath the
dignity of a man eligible for the highest magistracy. He
had gained an insight into all sorts of affairs at home
and abroad: he had been of the ''Ten" who managed the
war department, of the '' Eight " who attended to home

♦Now Boboli.

PROEM.

discipline, of the Priori or Signori who were the heads of
the executive government; he had even risen to the
supreme office of Gonfaloniere; he had made one in emhas-
sies to the Pope and to the Venetians; and he had been
commissary to the hired army of the Republic, dircting
the inglorious bloodless battles in which no man died of
brave breast wounds — virtuosi coljn — but only of casual
falls and tramplings. And in this way he had learned to
distrust men without bitterness; looking on life mainly
as a game of skill, but not dead to traditions of heroism
and clean-handed honor. For the human soul is hospi-
table, and will entertain conflicting sentiments and contra-
dictory opinions with much impartiality. It was his pride
besides, that he Avas duly tinctured with the learning of
his age, and judged not altogether with the vulgar, but in
harmony with the ancients: he, too, in his prime, had
been eager for tlie most correct manuscripts, and had paid
many florins for antique vases and for disinterred busts of
the ancient immortals — some, perhaps, frioicis naribus,
wanting as to the nose, but not the less authentic; and in
his old age he had made haste to look at the first sheets
of that fine Homer which was among the early glories of
the Florentine press. But he had not, for all that, neg-
lected to hang up a waxen image or double of himself
under the protection of the Madonna Annunziata, or to do
penance for his sins in large gifts to the shrines of saints
whose lives had not been modeled on the study of the
classics; he had not even neglected making liberal becpiests
toward buildings for the Frati, against whom he had
leveled many a jest.

For the Unseen Powers were mighty. Who knew — who
was sure — that there was any name given to them behind
which there was no angry force to be appeased, no inter-
cessory pity to be won? Were not gems medicinal, though
they only pressed the finger? W^ere not all things charged
with occult virtues? Lucretius might be right — he was
an ancient, and a great poet; Luigi Pulci, too, who was
suspected of not believing anything from the roof upward
{(M tetto in m), had very much the air of being right oyer
the supper-table, when the wine and jests were circulating
fast, though he was only a poet in the vulgar tongue.
There were even learned personages who maintained that
Aristotle, wisest of men (unless, indeed, Plato were wiser?)
was a thoroughly irreligious pliilosophcr; and a liberal
scholar must ente*^rtain all speculations. But the negatives

10 ROMOLA.

might, after all, prove false; nay, seemed manilestiy laise,
as the circling hours swept past him, and turned round
with graver faces. For had not the world become Christ-
ian? Had he not been baptized in San Giovanni, where
the dome is awful with the symbols of coming juslgment.
and where the altar bears a crucified Image disturbing to
perfect complacency in one's self and the world? Our
resuscitated Spirit was not a pagan philosopher, nor a
philosophizing pagan poet, but a man of the fifteenth
century, inheriting its strange Aveb of belief and unbelief;
of Epicurean levity and fetichistic dread ; of pedantic
impossible ethics uttered by rote, and crude passions acted
out with childish impulsiveness; of inclination toward a
self-indulgent paganism, and inevitable subjection to that
human conscience which, in the unrest of a new growth,
was filling the air with strange prophecies and presenti-
ments.

He had smiled, perhaps, and shaken his head dubiously,
as he heard simple folk talk of a Pope Angelico, who was
to come by-and-by and bring in a new order of things, to
purify the Church from simony, and the lives of the
clergy from scandal — a state of affairs too different from
what existed under Innocent VIII. for a shrewd merchant
and politician to regard the prospect as worthy of enter-
ing into his calculations. But he felt the evils of the
time, nevertheless; for he Avas a man of public spirit, and
2)ublic spirit can never be wholly immoral, since its essence
is care for a common good. That very Quaresima or Lent
of 1492 in which he died, still in his erect old age, he had
listened in San Lorenzo, not without a mixture of satis-
faction, to the preaching of a Dominican Friar, named
Girolamo Savonarola, who denounced with a rare boldness
the worldliness and vicious habits of the clergy, and
insisted on the duty of Christian men not to live for their
own ease Avhen wrong was triumphing in high places, and
not to spend their wealth in outward pomp even in the
churches, Avhen their fellow-citizens were suffering from
want and sickness. The Frate carried his doctrine rather
too far for elderly ears; yet it A\as a memora])le thing to
see a preacher move his audience to such a pitch that the
women even took off their ornaments, and delivered them
up to be sold for the benefit of the needy.

"He was a noteworthy man, that Prior of San Marco,"
thinks our Spirit; "somewhat arrogiint and extreme, per-
haps, especially in his denunciations of speedy vengeance.

PROEM. 11

Ah, Iddio non paga il Sabafo* — the wages of men's sins
often linger in their payment, and I myself saw much
established wickedness of long-standing prosperity. But
a Frate Predicatore who wanted to move the people — how
fould he be moderate? He might have been a little less
defiant and curt, though, to Lorenzo de Medici, whose
family had been the very makers of 8an Marco: Avas that
quarrel exer made up? And our Lorenzo himself, with
the dim outward eyes and the subtle inward vision, did he
get over that illness at Careggi ? It was but a sad, uneasy-
looking face that he would carry out of the world which
had given him so much, and there were strong suspicions
that his handsome son would play the part of Eehoboam.
How has it all turned out? Which party is likely to be
banished and have its houses sacked just now? Is there
any successor of the incomparable Lorenzo, to whom the
great Turk is so gracious as to send over presents of rare
animals, rare relics, rare manuscripts, or fugitive enemies,
suited to the tastes of a Christian Magnifico who is at once
lettered and devout — and also slightly vindictive? And
what famous scholar is dictating the Latin letters of the
Eepublic — what fiery philosopher is lecturing on Dante in
the Duomo, and going home to write bitter invectives
against the father and mother of the bad critic who may
have found fault with his classical spelling? Are our
wiser heads leaning toward alliance with the Pope and
the Regno,! or are they rather inclining their ears to the
orators of France and of Milan?

'' There is knowledge of these things to be had in the
streets below, on tlie beloved marmi in front of the
churches and under the sheltering Loggie, where surely
our citizens have still their gossip and debates, their bitter
and merry jests as of old. For are not the well-remem-
bered buildings all there? The changes have not been so
freat in those uncounted years. I will go down and hear —
Avill tread the familiar pavement, and hear once again
the speech of Florentines."

Go not down, good Spirit! for the changes are great and
the speecli of Florentines would sound as a riddle in youi
ears. Or, if you go, mingle with no politicians on the
marmi, or elsewhere; ask no questions about trade in the
Calimara; confuse yourself with no inquiries into scholar-
ship, official or monastic. Only look at the sunlight and

*" God does not pay on a Saturday."

+ The name given to Naples by way of distinction among the Italian states.

1 2 ROMOLA

shadows on the grand walls that were built solidly, and
have endured in their grandeur: look at the faces of the
little children, making another sunlight amid the shadows
of age; look, if you will, into the churches, and hear tlie
same chants, see the same images as of old — the images of
willing anguish for a great end, of beneficent love and
ascending glory; see upturned living faces and lips moving
to the old prayers for help. These things have not changed.
The sunlight"^ and shadows bring their old beauty and
Avaken the old heart-strains at morning, noon, and even-
tide; the little children are still the symbol of the eternal
marriage between love and duty; and men still yearn for
the reign of peace and righteousness — still own that life to
be the highest which is a conscious voluntary sacrifice.
For the Pope Angelico is not come yet.

BOOK I.
CHAPTEK I.

THE SHIPWRECKED STEAJfGEE.

The Loggia de Cerchi stood in the heart of old Florence,
within a lab3'rinth of narrow streets behind the Badia, noAv
rarely threaded by the stranger, unless in a dubious search
for a certain severely simple doorplace, bearing this inscrip-
tion:

QUI NACQUE IL DmisO POETA.

To the ear of Dante, the same streets rang with the shout
and clash of fierce battle between rival families; but in the
fifteenth century, they were only noisy with the unhistor-
ical quarrels and broad jests of wool-carders in the cloth-
producing quarters of San Martino and Garbo.

Under this loggia, in the early morning of the ninth of
April, 1492, two' men had their eyes fixed on each other:
one was stooping slightly, and looking downward with the
scrutinv of curiosity; the other, lying on the pavement,
was looking upward with the startled gaze of a suddenly-
awakened dreamer.

The standing figure was the first to speak. He was a
gray-haired, broad-shouldered man, of the type which, in
Tuscan phrase, is moulded Avith the fist and polished with
the pickaxe; but the self-important gravity which had
written itself out in the deep lines about his brow and
mouth seemed intended to correct any contemptuous
inferences from the hasty workmanship which Nature had
bestowed on his exterior. He had deposited a large well-
filled bag, made of skins, on the pavement, and before him
hung a peddlar's basket, garnished partly with small
woman's- ware, such as thread and pins, and partly with
fragments of glass, which had probably been taken in
exchange for those commodities.

"Young man," he said, pointing to a ring on the finger
of the reclining figure, " when your chin has got a stiff er
crop on it, you'll know better than to take your nap in

14 aoMOLA.

street corners with a ring like that on your forefinger. By
the holy 'vangels! if it had been anybody but me standing

over you two minutes ago but Bratti Ferravecchi is not

the man to steal. The eat couldn't eat her mouse if she
didn't catch it alive, and Bratti couldn't relish gain if it
had no taste of a bargain. Why, young man, one San
Giovanni, three years ago, the Saint sent a dead body in
my way — a blind beggar, with his cap well lined with
pieces- but, if you'll believe me, my stomach turned
against the money I'd never bargained for, till it came into
my head that San Giovanni owed me the pieces for what I
sj)end yearly at the Festa; besides, I buried the body and
paid for a mass — and so I saw it was a fair bargain. But
how comes a young man like yoa, with the face of Messer
San Michele, to be sleeping on a stone bed with the wind
for a curtain ? "

The deejD guttural sounds of the speaker were scarcely
intelligible to the newly-waked, bewildered listener, but
he understood the action of pointing to his ring: he
looked down at it, and, with a half-automatic obedience
to the warning, took it off and thrust it within his doub-
let, rising at the same time and stretching himself.

''Your tunic and hose match ill with that jewel, young
man," said Bratti, deliberately. '"'Anybody might say
the saints had sent you a dead body; but if you took the
jewels, I hope you buried him — and you can afford a
mass or two for him into the bargain."

Something like a painful thrill appeared to dart through
the frame of the listener, and arrest the careless stretch-
ing of his arms and chest. For an instant he turned on
Bratti with a sharp frown; but he immediately recovered
an air of indifference, took off the red Levantine cap
which hung like a great purse over his left ear, pushed
back his long dark -brown curls, and glancing at his dress,
said, smilingly —

"You speak truth, friend: my garments are as weather-
stained as an old sail, and they are not old, either, only,
like an old sail, they have had a sj)rinkling of the sea as
well as the rain. The fact is, I'm a strauger in Florence,
and when I came in footsore last night I preferred fling-
ing myself in a corner of this hospitable porch to hunting
any longer for a chance hostelry, which might turn out to
be a nest of blood-suckers of more sorts than one."

"A stranger, in good sooth," said Bratti, "for the
words come all melting out of your throat, so that a

THE SHIPWKECKED STEANGER. !•'

Christian and a Florentine can't tell a hook from a hanger.
But you're not from Genoa? More likely from Venice,
by the cut of your clothes."

"At this present moment/' said the stranger, smiling,
"it is of less importance Avhere I come from than where
I can go to for a mouthful of breakfast. This city of
vours turns a grim look on me just here: can you show
me the way to a more lively quarter, where I can get a
meal and a lodging?"

"That I can," said Bratti, "and it is your good
fortune, voung man, that I have happened to be walking
m from Kovezzano this morning, and turned out of my
wav to Mercato Yecchio to say an Ave at the Badia.
That, I say, is your good fortune. But it remains to be
seen 'what is my profit in the matter. Xothing for
nothing, young man. If I show you the way to Mercato
Yecchio, you'll swear by your patron saint to let me have
the bidding for that stained suit of yours, when you set
up a better — as doubtless you will."

"Agreed, by San Xiccolo," said the other, laughing.
" But noAv let us set off to this said Mercato, for I feel
the want of a better lining to this doublet of mine which
vou are coveting."

" "Coveting? Xay," said Bratti, heaving his bag on his
back and setting out. But he broke off in his reply, and
burst out in loud, harsh tones, not unlike the creaking
and grating of a cartwheel: "CJii aUaratta — baratta —
h'raUa — chi aUaratta cenci e vetri — h'ratta ferri vec-

chi?"* , . . ,

" It's worth but little," he said presently, relapsing into
his conversational tone. "Hose and altogether, your
clothes are worth but little. Still, if you've a mind to set
yourself up with a lute worth more than any new one, or
with a sword that's been worn by a Ridolfi, or with a pater-
noster of the best mode, / could -let yon have a great bar-
gain, by making an allowance for the clothes; for simple
as I stand here, I've got the best-furnished shop in the
Ferravecchi, and it's close by the Mercato. The Virgin be
praised! it's not a pumpkin I carry on my shoulders. But
I don't stay caged in my shop all day: I've got a wife and
a raven to stay at home and mind the stock. Chi ahha-
ratta—baratta—Vrattal * * * And now, young man,
where do you come from, and what's your business in
Florence?"

* " Who wants to exchange rags, broken glass, or old iron ? "

IG ROMOLA.

" I thought yon liked nothing that came to yon withont
a bargain," said the stranger. " You've offered me nothing
yet in exchange for that information."

"Well, well; a Florentine doesn't mind bidding a fair
price for news: it stays the stomach a little, though he may
win no hose by it. If I take you to the prettiest damsel
in the Mercato to get a cup of milk — that Avill be a fair
bargain."

" Nay; I can find her myself, if she be really in the Mer-
cato; for pretty heads are apt to look forth of doors and
windows. No, no. Besides a sharp trader, like you, ought
to know that he who bids for nuts and news, may chance
to find them hollow."

"Ah! young man,' said Bratti, with a sideway glance
of some admiration, "You were not born of a Sunday —
the salt-shops were open when you came into the world.
You're not a Hebrew, eh? — come from Spain or Naples,
eh? Let me tell you the Frati Minori are trying to make
Florence as hot as Spain for those dogs of hell that want
to get all the profit of usury to themselves and leave none
for Christians; and when you walk the Calimara with a
piece of 3^ellow cloth in your cap, it will spoil your beauty
more than a sword-cut across that smooth olive cheek of
yours. — Abharatta, baratta — clti ahbaratta? — I tell you,
young man, gray clotn is against yellow cloth; and there's
as much gray cloth in Florence as would make a gown and
cowl for thefDuomo, and there's not so much yellow cloth
as would make hose for Saint Christopher — blessed be his
name, and send me a sight of liim this daj'I — Ahharatta,
haratta, Vratta — clii abbaratta f "

" All that is very amusing information you are parting
with for nothing," said the stranger, rather scornfully; but
it happens not to concern me. I am no Hebrew."

"See, now!" said Bratti, triumphantly; I've made a
good bargain with mere Avords. I've made you tell me
sometliing, young man, though you're as hard to hold as
a lamprey. San Giovanni be praised! a blind Florentine
is a match for two one-eyed men. But here we are in tlie
Mercato."

Tiiey had now emerged from the narrow streets into a
broad piazza, known to the elder Florentine writers as the
Mercato Vecchio, or the old Market. This piazza, though
it had been the scene of a provision-market from time
immemorial, and may, perliaps, says fond imagination, be
the very sj)ot to Mdiich the Fesulean ancestors of the Flor-

THE SHIPWRECKED STKANGER. It

entines descended from their high fastness to traflac with
the rustic population of the valley, had not been shunned
as a place of residence by Florentine wealth. In the early
decades of the fifteenth century, which was now near its
end, the Medici and other powerful families of the j^^o-
lani grassi. or commercial nobility, had their houses
there, not perhaps finding their ears much offended by the
loud roar of mingled dialects, or their eyes much shocked
by the butchers' stalls, which the old poet Antonio Pucci
accounts a chief giorv, or dignita, of a market that, in
his esteem, eclipsed the markets of all the earth besides.
But the slory of mutton and veal (well attested to be the
flesh of the right animals; for were not the skins, with
the heads attached duly displayed, according to the decree
of the Signoria?) was "just now wanting to the Mercato,
the time of Lent not being yet over. The proud corpora-
tion, or ''Art," of butchers^ was in abeyance, and it was
the great harvest-time of the market-gardeners, the
cheesemongers, the venders of macaroni, corn, eggs, milk,
and dried fruits: a change which was apt to make the
women's voices predominant in the chorus. But in all
seasons there was the experimental ringing of pots and
pans, the clinking of the money-changers, the tempting
offers of cheapness at the old-clothes stalls, the challenges
of the dicers, the vaunting of new linens and w^oolens,
of excellent wooden-ware, kettles, and frying-pans; there
Avas the choking of the narrow inlets with mules and
carts together with much uncomplimentary remonstrance
in terms remarkably identical with the insults in use by
the gentler sex of the present day, under the same
imbrowning and heating circumstances. Ladies and gen-
tlemen, who came to market, looked on at a larger amount
of amateur fighting than could easily be seen in these
later times, and beheld more revolting rags, beggarv, and
rascaldom, than modern householders could well picture
to themselves. As the day wore on, the hideous drama of
the gaming-house might be seen here by any chance open-
air spectator — the quivering eagerness, the blank despair,
the sobs, the blasphemy, and the blows: —

" E vedesi chi perde con gran soffl,
E bestemmiar colla mano alia mascella,
E ricever e dar di molti ingoffi."

But still there was the relief of prettier sights: there
were brood-rabbits, not less innocent and astonished than
those of our own period; there were doves and singing-

18 ROMOLA.

birds to be bought as presents for the chiklreu; there
were even kittens for sale, and here and there a handsome
gattuccio, or " Tom/' with tlie highest character for mous-
ing; and, better than all; there were young, softly-rounded
cheeks and bright eyes, freshened by the start from the
far-off castello* at daybreak, not to speak of older faces
with the unfading charm of honest goodwill in them, sucli
as are never quite wanting in scenes of human industry.
And high on a pillar in the center of the place — a venera-
ble jiillar, fetched from the church of San Giovanni —
stood Donatello's stone statue of Plenty, with a fountain
near it, where, says old Pucci, the good wives of the mar-
ket freshened their utensils, and their throats a^lso; not
because they were unable to buy wine, but because they
Avished to save the money for their husbands.

But on this particular morning a sudden change seemed
to have come over the face of the market. The desclii, or
stalls, were indeed partly dressed with their various com-
modities, and already there were purchasers asseml)led, on
the alert to secure the finest, freshest vegetables and the
most unexceptionable butter. But when Bratti and his
companion entered the piazza, it appeared that some com-
mon preoccupation had for the moment distracted the
attention both of buyers and sellers from their proj^cr
business. Most of the traders had turned their backs on
their goods, and had joined the knots of talkers who were
concentrating themselves at different points in tlie piazza.
A vendor of old clothes, in the act of hanging out a pair
of long hose, had distractedly hung them round his neck
in his eagerness to join the nearest group; an oratorical
cheesemonger, with a piece of cheese in one hand and a
knife in the other, was incautiously making notes of his
emphatic pauses on that excelleht specimen of marzolino;
and elderly market-women, with their egg-baskets in a
dangerously oblique position, contributed a wailing fugue
invocation.

In this general distraction, the Florentnie boys, who
were never wanting in any street scene, and were of an
especially miscliievous sort — as who should say, very sour
crabs indeed — saw a great opportunity. Some made a rush
at the nuts and dried figs, others preferred the farinaceous
delicacies at the cooked provision stalls — delicacies to which
certain four-footed dogs also, who had learned to take
kindly to Lenten fare, applied a discriminating nostril,

* Walled village.

THE SHIPWRECKED STKAXGER. 19

and then disappeared with much rapidity under the nearest
shelter; while the mules, not without some kicking and
plunging among impeding baskets, were stretching then-
muzzles toward the aromatic green-meat.

'•Diavolol" said Bratti, as he and his companion came,
quite unnoticed upon the noisy scene; "the Mercato is
ooue as mad as if the most Holy Father had excommuni-
cated us again. I must know what this is. But never
fear: it seems a thousand years to you till you see the
prettv Tessa, and get vour cup of milk; but keep hold of
me, and I'll hold to mv bargain. Remember, I'm to have
the first bid for vour suit, specially for the hose, which
with all their stains, are the best j^cmno di garbo—as good
as ruined, though, with mud and weather stains."

'•Ola, Monna^Trecca," Bratti proceeded, turning toward
an old woman on the outside of the nearest group, who
for the moment had suspended her wail to listen, and
shouting close in her ear: '•Here are the mules upsetting
all your bunches of parsley: is the world commg to an end,

then?" _ ^ „.

•Olonua Trecca" (equivalent to ''Dame Greengrocer )
turned round at this unexpected trumpeting in her right
ear, with a half-fierce, half-bewildered look, first at the
speaker, then at her disarranged commodities, and then at
the speaker again.

"A bad Easter and a bad year to you, and may you die
by the sword!'' she burst out, rushing toward her stall,
but directing this first volley of her wrath against Bratti,
who, without heeding the malediction, quietly slipped into
her place, within hearing of the narrative which had been
absorbing her attention; making a sign at the same time to
the voung stranger to keep near him.

•'*! tell you I saw it myself," said a fat man, with a
bunch of newly-purchased leeks in his hand. "I was in
Santa Maria Xovella, and saw it myself. The woman
started up and threw out her arms, and cried out and said
slie saw a big bull with fiery horns coming down on the
church to crush it. I saw it myself.''

"Saw what, Goro?" said a man of slim figure, whose
eve twinkled rather roguishly. He wore a close Jerkin, a
skull-cap lodged carelesslv over his left ear as if it had
fallen there bv chance, a delicate linen apron tucked up on
one side, and' a razor stuck in his belt. " Saw the bull, or
onlv the woman?"

•'Why, the woman, to be sure; but it's all one, mt juo'e:

20 ROMOLA.

it doesn't alter the meaning — va!" answered the fat man,
with some contempt.

''Meaning? no, no; that's clear enough," said several
voices at once, and then followed a confusion of tongues,
in which "Lights shooting over San Lorenzo for three
nights altogether" — "Thunder in the clear starlight " —
"Lantern of the Duomo struck with the sword of St.
Michael " — " Palle "* — " All smashed " — " Lions tearing
each other to pieces" — "Ah I and they might well" —
" Buto\ caduto in Santissima JViinziafa!" — "Died like
the best of Christians" — "God will have pardoned him"
— were often-repeated phrases, which shot across each other
like storm-driven hailstones, each speaker feeling rather
the necessity of utterance than of finding a listener. Per-
haps the only silent members of the group were Bratti,
who, as a new-comer, was busy in mentally piecing together
the flying fragments of information; the man of the razor;
and a thin-lipped, eager-looking personage in spectacles,
wearing a pen-and-ink case at his belt.

" Ebhene, ISTello," said Bratti, skirting the group till he
was within hearing of the barber. "It appears the Mag-
nifico is dead — rest his soul! — and the price of wax will
rise?"

"Even as you say," answered Nello; and then added,
with an air of extra gravity, but with marvelous rapidity,
" and his waxen image in the Nunziata fell at the same
moment, they say; or at some other time, whenever it
pleases the Frati Serviti, who know best. And several
cows and women have had still-born calves this Quaresima;
and for the bad eggs that have been broken since the
Carnival, nobody has counted them. Ah! a great man — a
great politician — a greater poet than Dante. And yet the
cupola didn't fall, only the lantern. Che miracolo!"

A sharp and lengthened "Pst!" was suddenly heard
darting across the pelting storm of gutturals. It came
from the pale man in spectacles, and had the effect he
intended; for the noise-ceased, and all eyes in the group
were fixed on him with a look of expectation.

"'Tis well said you Florentines are blind," he began, in
an incisive high voice. " It appears to me, you need noth-
ing but a diet of hay to make cattle of 3'ou. What! do
you think the death of Lorenzo is the scourge God has

♦ Arms of the Medici.

+ A votive image of Lorenzo, in wax, hung up in the church of the
Annunziata, supposeJ to have fallen at the time of his death. Boto is popu-
lar Tuscan for Viito.

THE SHIPWRECKED STRANGER. 21

prepared for Florence? Go! yon are sparrows chattering
praise over tlie dead hawk. What! a luau who was trying
to slip a noose over every neck in the Republic that he
might tighten at his pleasure! You like that; you like to
have the election of your magistrates turned into closet-
work, and no man to use the rights of a citizen unless he
is a medicean. That is what is meant by qualification
now: netto di speccMo* no longer means that a man pays
his dues to the Republic: it means that he'll wink at rob-
bery of the people's money— at robbery of their daughters'
dowries; that he'll play tlie chamberer and the philosopher
by turns — listen to bawdy songs at the Carnival and cry
'Bellissimi!'— and listen to sacred lauds and cry again
• Bellissimi! ' But this is what you love: you grumble and
raise a riot over your quatfrini bicmchi" {white farthings);
''but you take no notice when the public treasury has got
a hole in the bottom for the gold to run into Lorenzo's
drains. You like to pay for footmen to walk before and
behind one of your citizens, that he may be affable and
condescending to you. ' See what a tall Pisan we keep,'
say you, *' to march before him with the drawn sword flash-
ing in our eyes! — and yet Lorenzo smiles at us. What
goodness! ' And you think the death of a man, who would
soon have saddled and bridled you as the §forza saddled
and bridled Milan— you think his death is the scourge God
is warning you of by portents, I tell you there is another
sort of scourge in the air."

''Nay, nay, Ser Cioni, keep astride your politics, and
never mount your prophecy; politics is the better horse,"
said Nello. "But if you talk of portents, what portent
can be greater than a pious notary? Balaam's ass was
nothing to it."

"Ay, but a notary out of work, with his inkbottle dry,"
said another bystander, very much out at elbows. " Better
don a cowl at once, Ser Cioni; everybody will believe in
your fasting."

The notary turned and left the group with a look of
indignant contempt, disclosing, as he did so, the sallow
but mild face of a short man who had been standing behind
him, and whose bent shoulders told of some sedentary
occupation.

"By San Giovanni, though," said the fat purchaser of
leeks, with the air of a person rather shaken in his theories,

* The phrase used to express the absence of disqualiflcatlon— i.e., the uot
being entered as a debtor in the public book (specchio).

22 ROMOLA.

'' I am not sure there isn't some truth in what Ser Cioni
says. For I know I have good reason to find fault with
the quatirini bianchi myself. Grumble, did he say? Suf-
focation I I should think we do grumble; and let anybody
say the word, I'll turn out into the piazza with the readiest,
sooner than have our money altered in our hands as if the
magistracy were so many necromancers. And it's true
Lorenzo might have hindered such work if lie would — and
for the bull with the flaming horns, why, as Ser Cioni says,
there may be many meanings to it, for the matter of that;
it may have more to do with the taxes than we think. For
when God above sends a sign, it's not to be supposed he'd
have only one meaning."

" Spoken like an oracle, Goro ! " said the barber. " Why,
when we poor mortals can pack two or three meanings
into one sentence, it were mere blasphemy not to believe
that your miraculous bull means everything that any man
in Florence likes it to mean."

''Thou art pleased to scoff, Nello," said the sallow,
round-shouldered man, no longer eclipsed by the notary,
"but it is not the less true that every revelation, Avhether
by visions, dreams, portents, or the written word, has
many meanings, which it is given to the illuminated onlv
to unfold." .

"Assuredly," answered Nello. "Haven't I been to
hear the Frate in San Lorenzo? But then, I've been to
hear Fra Menico in the Duomo, too; and according to
him, your Fra Girolama, with his visions and interpreta-
tions, is running after the wind of Mongibello, and those
Avho follow him are like to have the fate of certain swine
that ran headlong into the sea — or some hotter place.
With San Domenico roaring e vero in one ear, and San
Francisco screaming e falso in the other, what is a poor
barber to do — unless he were illuminated? But it's plain
our Goro here is beginning to be illuminated, for he already
sees that the bull with the flaming horns means first him-
self, and secondly all the other aggrieved taxpayers of
Florence, who are determined to gore the magistracy oji
the first opportunity."

"Goro is a fool!" said a bass voice, with a note that
dropped like the sound of a great bell in the midst of much
tinkling. " Let him carry home his leeks and shake his
flanks over his wool-beating. He'll mend matters more
that way than b}' showing his tun-shaped body in the
piazza, as if ever3'body might measure his grievances by the

THE SHIPWRECKED STRA^'GEE. ^o

oiac uX nis paimcli. The biirdcus that harm him most are
his heavy carcass and his idleness."

The speaker had joined the group only in time to hear
the conclusion of ISi^ello's speech, but he was one of those
figures for whom all the world instinctively makes way, as
it would for a battering-ram. He was not mucli above
the middle height, but the impression of enormous force
which was conveyed by his capacious chest and brawny
arms bared to the shoulder, was deepened by the keen
sense and quiet resolution expressed in his glance and in
every furrow of his cheek and brow. He had often been
an unconscious model to Domenico Ghirlandajo, when that
great painter was making the walls of the churches reflect
the life of Florence, and translating pale aerial traditions
into the deep color and strong lines of the faces he knew.
The naturally dark tint of his skin was additionally
bronzed by the same powdery deposit that gave a polished
black surface to his leathern apron: a deposit which habit
had probably made a necessary condition of perfect ease,
for it was not washed off with punctilious regularity.

Goro turned his fat cheek and glassy eye on the frank
speaker with a look of deprecation rather than of resent-
ment.

"Why, Niccolo," he said, in an injured tone, '' I've
heard you sing to another tune than that, often enough,
when youVe been laying down the law at San Gallo on a
festa. " I've heard you say yourself, that a man wasn't a
mill-wheel, to be on the grind, grind, as long as he was
driven, and then stick in his place without stirring when
the water was low. And you're as fond of your vote as
any man in Florence — ay, and I've heard you say, if Lo-
renzo "

"Yes, yes," said Niccold. "Don't you be bringing up
my speeches again after you've swallowed them, and hand-
ing them about as if they were none the worse. I vote
. and I speak when there's any use in it: if there's hot metal
on the anvil, I lose no time before I strike; but I don't
spend good hours in tinkling on cold iron, or in standing
on the pavement as thou dost, Goro, with snout upward,
like a pig under an oak-tree. And as for Lorenzo — dead
and gone before this time — he was a man who had an eye
for curious iron-work; and if anybody says he wanted to
make himself a tyrant, I say, ' Sia; I'll not deny which
way the wind blows when every man can see the weather-
cock.' But that only means that Lorenzo was a crested

24 ROMOLA.

hawk, and there are plenty of hawks without crests whose
claws and beaks are as good for tearing. Though if there
was any chance of a real reform, so that Marzocco* might
shake his name and roar again, instead of dipping his
head to lick the feet of anybody that will mount and ride
him, I'd strike a good blow for it,"

"And that reform is not far off, Niccolo," said the sal-
low, mild-faced man, seizing his opportunity like a mis-
sionary among the too light-minded heathens; '^ for a time
of tribulation is coming, and the scourge is at hand. And
when the church is purged of cardinals and prelates who
traffic in her inheritance that their hands may be full to
pay the price of blood and satisfy their own lusts, the
State will be purged too — and Florence will be purged of
men who love to see avarice and lechery under the red hat
and the mitre because it gives them the screen of a more
hellish vice than their own."

" Ay, as Goro's broad body would be a screen for my
narrow person in case of missiles," said Nello; "but if
that excellent screen happened to fall, I were stifled under
it, surely enough. That is no bad image of thine, Nanni —
or, rather, of the Frate's; for I fancy there is no room in
the small cup of thy understanding for any other liquor
than what he pours into it."

"And it were well for thee, Xello," re))lied Nanni, "if
thou couldst empty thyself of thy scoffs and thy jests,
and take in that li({uor too. The warning is ringing in
the ears of all men: and it's no new story; for the Abbot
Joachim prophesied of the coming time three hundred
years ago, and now Fra Girolamo has got the message
afresh. He has seen it in a vision, even as the pro2:)hets
of old: he has seen the sword hanging from the sky."

"Ay, and thou wilt see it thyself, Nanni, if thou wilt
stare upward long enough," said Niccolo; "for that piti-
able tailor's work of thine makes thy noddle so overhang
thy legs that thy eyeballs can see naught above the stitch-
ing-board but the roof of thy own skull."

The honest tailor bore the jest without bitterness, bent
on convincing his hearers of his doctrine rather than of
his dignity. But Niccolo gave him no opportunity for
replying; for he turned away to the pursuit of his market
business, probably considering further dialogue as a tink-
ling on cold iron.

" Ebbene," snid the man with the hose around his neck,

* The stone Lion, emblem of the Republic.

THE SHIPWRECKED STRANGER. 25

who had lately migrated from anotlier knot of talkers,
^' they are safest who cross themselves and Jest at nobody.
Do you know that the Magnifico sent for the Frate at the
last, and couldn't die without his blessing?"

" Was it so — in truth?" said several voices. '' Yes, yes-
God will have pardoned him." " He died like the best of
Christians." ''Never took his eyes from the holy crucifix."

"And the Frate will have given him his blessing?"

"Well, I know no more," said he of the hosen; "only
Guccio there met a footman going back to Careggi, and
he told him the Frate had been sent for yesternight, after
the Magnifico had confessed and had the holy sacraments."

" It's likely enough the Frate will tell the people some-
thing about "it in his sermon this morning; is it not true,
Xanni? " said Goro. " What do you think? "

But Xanni had already turned his back on Goro, and
the group was rapidly thinning; some being stirred by the
impulse to go and hear "new things" from the Frate
(" new things" were the nectar of Florentines): others by
the sense that it was time to attend to their private busi-
ness. In this general movement, Bratti got close to the
barber, and said —

"Xello, you've a ready tongue of your own, and are
used to worming secrets out of people when you've once
got them well lathered. I picked up a stranger this morn-
ing as I was coming in from Rovezzauo, and I can spell
him out no better than I can the letters on that scarf I
bought from the French Cavalier. It isn't my wits are at
fault,— I want no man to help me tell peas from paternos-
ters,— but when you come to foreign fashions, a fool may
happen to know more thaii a wise man."

"Ay, thou hast the wisdom of ]\[idas, who could turn
rags and rusty nails into gold, even as thou dost," said
Nello, " and he had something of the ass about him. But
where is thy bird of strange plumage?"

Bratti was looking round, with an air of disappointment.

"Diavolol" he said, with some vexation. "The bird's
flown. It's true he was hungry, and I forgot him. But
we shall find him in the Mercato"', within scent of bread and
savors, I'll answer for him."

" Let us make the round of the Mercato then," said
Xello.

"It isn't his feathers that puzzle me," continued Bratti,
as thev pushed their wav together. " There isn't much m

26 ROMOLA.

the way of cut and cloth on this side the Holy Sepulchre
that can puzzle a Florentine."

''Or frighten him, either," said Nello, "after he has
seen an Englander or a German/'

''No, no," said Bratti, cordially; "one may never lose
sight of the Cupola and 3'et know the world, I hope.
Besides, this stranger's clothes are good Italian merchan-
dise, and the hose he wears were dyed in Ognissanti before
ever they were dyed with salt water, as he says. But the
riddle about him is "

Here Bratti's explanation was interrupted by some
jostling as they reached one of the entrances of the'piazza.
and before he could resume it they had caught sight of the
enigmatical object they were in search of.

CHAPTER II.

BKEAKFAST FOR LOVE.

After Bratti had joined the knot of talkers, the young
stranger, hopeless of learning what was the cause of the
general agitation, and not much caring to know what was
probably of little interest to any but born Florentines, soon
became tired of waiting for Bratti's escort; and chose to
stroll round the piazza, looking out for some vender of
eatables who might happen to have less than tlie average
curiosity about public news. But as if at the suggestion
of a sudden thought, he thrust his hand into a purse or
wallet that hung at his waist, and explored it again and
again with a look of frustration.

"Not an obolus, by Jupiter!" he murmured, in a lan-
guage which was not Tuscan or even Italian. "I thought
I had one poor piece left. I must get my breakfast for
love, then ! "

He had not gone many steps farther before it seemed
likely that he had found a quarter of the market where
that medium of exchange might not be rejected.

In a corner, away from any group of talkers, two mules
were standing, well adorned with red tassels and collars.
One of them carried wooden milk vessels, the other a pair
of panniers filled with herbs and salads. Resting her
elbow on the neck of the mule that carried milk, there

BREAKFAST FOR LOVE. 27

leaned a young girl, apparently not more than sixteen,
with a red hood surrounding her face, which was all the
more baby-like in its prettiness from the entire conceal-
ment of her hair. The poor child, perhaps, was weary
after her labor iia the morning twiliglit in preparation f<n-
her walk to market from some castello three or four miles
off, for she seemed to have gone to sleep in that half-
standing, half-leaning posture. Xevertheless. our stranger
had no compunction in awaking her; but the means he
chose were so gentle, that it seemed to the damsel in her
dream as if a little sprig of thyme had touched her lips
while she was stooping to gather the herbs. The dream
was broken, however, for she opened her blue baby-eyes,
and started up \vith astonishment and confusion to see the
young stranger standing close before her. She heard him
speaking to her in a voice which seemed so strange and soft,
that even if she had been more collected she would have
taken it for granted that he said something hopelessly unin-
telligible to her, and her first movement was to turn her
head a little away, and lift up a corner of her green serge
mantle as a screen. He repeated his words —

" Forgive me, pretty one, for awaking you. I'm dying
with hunger, and the scent of milk makes breakfast seem
more desirable than ever."

He had chosen the words '* muoio di fame," because he
knew they would be familiar to her ears; and he had
uttered them playfully, with the intonation of a mendi-
cant. This time' he was understood; the corner of the
mantle was dropped, and in a few moments a large cup of
fragrant milk was held out to him. He paid no further
compliments before raising it to his lips, and while he was
drinking the little maiden found courage to look up at the
long dark curls of this singular-voiced stranger, who had
asked for food in the tones of a beggar, but who, though
his clothes were much damaged, was unlike any beggar she
had ever seen.

While this process of survey was going on, there Avas
another current of feeling that carried her hand into a bag
which hung by the side of the mule, and when the stranger
set down his cup he saw a large piece of bread held out
toward him, and caught a glance of the blue eyes that
seemed intended as an encouragement to him to take this
additional gift.

" But perhaps that is your own breakfast," he said. " No,

38 EOMOLA.

I have had enough without payment, A thousand thanks,
my gentle one."

There was no rejoinder in words; but the piece of bread
was pushed a little nearer to him, as if in impatience at his
refusal; and as the long dark eyes of the stranger rested on
the baljy-face, it seemed to be gathering more and more
courage to look up and meet them.

"Ah, then, if I must take the bread," he said, laying
his hand on it, " I shall get bolder still, and beg for
another kiss to make the bread sweeter."

His speech was getting wonderfully intelligible in spite
of the strange voice, which had at first almost seemed a
thing to make her cross herself. She blushed deeply, and
lifted up a corner of her mantle to her mouth again." But
just as the too presumptuous stranger was leaning forward,
and had his fingers on the arm that held up the screening
mantle, he was startled by a harsh voice close upon his
ear.

" Who are yoii — with a murrain to you ? No honest
buyer, I'll warrant, but a hanger-on of the dicers — or
something worse. Go! dance oif, and find fitter com-
pany, or I'll give you a tune to a little quicker time
than you'll like."

The young stranger drew back and looked at the speaker
with a glance provokingly free from alarm and depreca-
tion, and his slight expression of saucy amusement broke
into a broad beaming smile as he surveyed the figure of his
threatener. She was a stout but brawny woman, with a
man's jerkin slipped over her green serge gamurra or
gown, and the peaked hood of some departed mantle fast-
ened round her sun-burnt face, which, under all its coarse-
ness and ijremature wrinkles, showed a half-sad, half-
ludicrous maternal resemblance to the tender baby-face
of the little maiden — the sort of resemblance which often
seems a more croaking, shudder-creating prophecy than
that of the death's-head.

There was something irresistibly propitiating in that
bright young smile, but Monna Ghita was not a woman to
betray any weakness, and she went on speaking, apparently
witli lieightened exasperation.

"Yes, yes, you can grin as well as other monkeys in cap
and jerkin. You're a minstrel or a mountebank, I'll be
sworn; you look for all the woi'ld as silly as a tumbler when
he's been upside down and has got on his lu-els again.
And what fool's tricks liast tliou been after, Tessa?" she

BREAKFAST FOK LOVE. 29

added, turning to her daughter, whose frightened face was
more inviting to abuse. ''Giving away the milk and
victuals, it seems; ay, ay, thou'dst carry water in thy ears
for any idle vagabond that didn't like to stoop for it, thou
silly staring rabbit! Turn thy back, and lift the herbs out
of the panniers, else Fll make thee say a few Aves without
counting."

"Nay, Madonna," said tlie stranger, with a pleading
smile, " don't be angry with your pretty Tessa for taking
pity on a hungry traveler, who found himself unex-
pectedly Avithout a quattrino. Your handsome face looks
so well when it frowns, that I long to see it illuminated by
a smile."

" Va, via! I know what paste you are made of. You
may tickle me with that straw a good long while before I
shall laugh, I can tell you. Get along, with a bad Easter!
else I'll make a beauty-spot or two on that face of yours
that shall spoil your kissing on this side Advent."

As Monna Ghita lifted her formidable talons by way of
complying with the first and last requisite of eloquence,
Bratti, who had come up a minute or two before, had been
saying to his companion, " What think you of this pretty
parrot, Nello? Doesn't his tongue smack of Venice?"

"Nay, Bratti," said the barber in an undertone, "thy
wisdom has much of the ass in it, as 1 told thee just now;
especially about the ears. This stranger is a Greek, else
I'm not the barber who has had the sole and exclusive
shaving of the excellent Demetrio, and drawn more than
one sorry tooth from his learned jaw\ And this youth
might be taken to have come straight from Olympus — at
least when he has had a touch of my razor."

" Orsfi! Monna Ghita!" continued Nello, not sorry to
see some sport; "what has happened to cause such a
thunderstorm ? Has this young stranger been misbehaving
himself?"

"By San Giovanni!" said the cautious Bratti, who had
not shaken off his original suspicions concerning the
shabbily-clad possessor of jewels, "he did right to run
away from me, if he meant to get into mischief. I can
swear that I found him under the Loggia de Cerchi, with
a ring on his finger such as I've seen Avorn by Bernardo
Eucellai himself. Not another rusty nail's Avorth do I
know about him."

"The fact is," said Nello, eyeing the stranger good-
humoredly, "this hello giovaue has been a little too pre-

30 ROMOLA.

sumptuous in admiring the charms of Monna Ghita, and
has attempted to kiss her while her daughter's back is turned ;
for I observe that the pretty Tessa is too busy to look this
way at present. Was it not so, Messer?" Nello concluded
in a tone of courtesy.

" You have divined the offense like a soothsayer/' said
the stranger, laughingly. " Only that I had not the good
fortune to find Monna Ghita here at first. I begged a cup
of milk from her daughter, and had accepted this gift of
bread, for which I was making a humble offering of grati-
tude, before I had the higher pleasure of being face to face
with these riper charms which I was perhaps too bold in
admiring.''

" Va, va! be off, every one of you, and stay in purga-
tory till I pay to get you out, will you ? " said Monna Ghita,
fiercely, elbowing Nello, and leading forward her mule so
as to compel the stranger to jump aside. "Tessa, thou
simpleton, bring forward thy mule a bit: the cart will be
upon us."

As Tessa turned to take the mule's bridle, she cast one
timid glance at the stranger, Avho was now moving with
Nello out of the way of an approaching market-cart; and
the glance was just long enough to seize the beckoning
movement of his hand, which indicated that he had been
watching for this' opportunity of an adieu.

" Ehhene," said Bratti, raising his voice to speak across
the cart; "I leave you with Xello, young man, for there's
no pushing my bag and basket any farther, and I have
business at home. But you'll remember our bargain,
because if you found Tessa without me, it was not my
fault. Nello will show you my shop in the Ferravecchi,
and I'll not turn my back on you."

**A thousand thanks, friend I" said the stranger, laugh-
ing, and then turned away with Nello up the narrow street
which led most directly to the Piazza del Duomo.

THE barber's shop. 31

CHAPTEE III.

THE barber's shop.

"To tell you the truth," said the young stranger to
Nello, as they got a little clearer of the entangled vehicles
and mules, " I am not sorry to be handed over by that
patron of mine to one who has a less barbarous accent,
and a less enigmatical business. Is it a common thing
among you Florentines for an itinerant trafficker in
broken glass and rags to talk of a shop where he sells
lutes and swords?"

'^ Common? No: our Bratti is not a common man.
He has a theory, and lives up to it, which is more than I
can say for any philosopher I have the honor of shaving,"
answered Nello, whose loquacity, like an over-full , bottle,
could never pour forth a small dose. "Bratti means to
extract the utmost possible amount of pleasure, that is to
say, of hard bargaining, out of this life; winding it up
with a bargain for the easiest possible passage through
purgatory, by giving Holy Church his winnings when
the game is over. He has had his will made to that effect
on the cheapest terms a notary could be got for. But I
have often said to him, 'Bratti, thy bargain is a limping
one, and thou art on the lame side of it. Does it not
make thee a little sad to look at the pictures of the
Paradiso? Thou wilt never be able there to chaffer for
rags and rusty nails: the saints and angels want neither
pins nor tinder; and except with San Bartolommeo, who
carries his skin about in an inconvenient manner, I see
no chance of thy making a bargain for second-hand cloth-
ing.' But God pardon me," added Nello, changing his
tone, and crossing himself, "this light talk ill beseems a
morning when Lorenzo lies dead, and the Muses are
tearing their hair — always a painful thought to a barber;
and you yourself, Messere, are probably under a cloud,
for when a man of your speech and presence takes up
with so sorry a night's lodging, it argues some misfortune
to have befallen him."

"What Lorenzo is that whose death you speak of?"
said the stranger, appearing to have dwelt with too
anxious an interest on this pomt to have noticed the indi-
rect inquiry that followed it.

32 IIO.MOLA.

What Lorenzo? There is out one Lorenzo, I imagine,
whose death conld throw the Mercato into an uproar, set
the lantern of the Duomo leaping in desperation, and
cause the lions of the Eepuhlic to feel under an immediate
necessity to devour one another. I mean Lorenzo de
Medici, the Pericles of our Athens — if I may make such
a comparison in the ear of a Greek."

''Why not?" said the other, laughingly; "for I doubt
whether Athens, even in the days of Pericles, could have
produced so learned a barber."

" Yes, yes; I thought I could not be mistaken," said the
rapid Nello, "else I have shaved the venerable Demetrio
Calcondila to little purpose; but pardon me, I am lost in
wonder: your Italian is better than his, though he has
been in Italy forty years — better even than that of the
accomplished Marullo, who may be said to have married
the Italic Muse in more senses than one, since he has
married our learned and lovely Alessandra Scala."

" It will lighten your wonder to know that I come of a
Greek stock j^lanted in Italian soil much longer than the
mulberry-trees which have taken so kindly to it. I was
born at Bari, and my — I mean, I was brought up by an
Italian — and, in fact, I am a Greek, very much as your
peaches are Persian. The Greek dye was subdued in me,
I suppose, till I have been dipped over again by long abode
and much travel in the land of gods and heroes. And, to
confess something of my private affairs to you, this same
Greek dye, with a few ancient gems I have about me, is
the only fortune shipwreck has left me. But — when the
towers fall, you know it is an ill business for the small
nest-builders — the death of your Pericles makes me wish
I had rather turned my steps toward Eome, as I should
have done but for a fallacious Minerva in the shape of an
Angustinian monk. 'At Rome,' he said, 'you will be
lost in a crowd of hungry scholars; but at Florence, every
corner is penetrated by the sunshine of Lorenzo's patronage:
Florence is the best market in Italy for such commodities
as yours.'"

" Gnaffe, and so it will remain, I hope," said Nello.
''Lorenzo was not the only patron and judge of learning
in our city — heaven forbid! Because he was a large melon
every other Florentine is not a pumpkin, I suppose. Have
we not Bernardo Rucellai and Alamanno Rinuccini, and
plenty more? And if you want to be informed on such
matters, T, Ts^ello, am your man. It seems to me a thousand

THE baeber's shop. 33

years till I can be of service to a M erucUto like yourself.
And, first of all, m the matter of your hair. That beard,
mv fine young man, must be parted with, were it as dear
to you as the nymph of your dreams. Here at Florence,
we love not to see a man with his nose projecting over a
cascade of hair. But, remember, you will have passed the
rubicon, when once you have been shaven: if you repent,
and let your beard grow after it has acquired stoutness
by a struggle with the razor, your mouth will by-and-by
show no longer what Messer Angelo calls the divme pre-
rogative of lips, but will appear like a dark cavern fringed
with horrent brambles."

''That is a terrible prophecy," said the Greek, ' espe-
cially if your Florentine maidens are many of theni as
pretty as the little Tessa I stole a kiss from this morning

" Tessa ^ she is a rough-handed contadma: you will
rise into the favor of dames who bring no scent of the
mule-stables with them. But to that end, you must not
have the air of a sgherro, or a man of evil repute: you
must look like a courtier, and a scholar of the more
polished sort, such as our Pietro Crinito, like one who sms
among well-bred, well-fed people, and not^one who sucks
down vile viiio di softo in a chance tavern.'

"With all my heart," said the stranger. -it the
Florentine Graces demand it, I am willing to give up

this small matter of my beard, but "

"Yes yes," interrupted Nello. '"'I know what you
would say. It is the Mia zazzera — the hyacmthme locks,
you do not choose to part with; and there is no need.
Just a little pruning— ecco! — and you will look not unlike
the illustrious prince Pico di Mirandola m his prime.
And here we are in good time in the Piazza San Giovanni,
and at the door of my shop. But you are pansmg, I see:
naturally, you want to look at our wonder of the world,
our Du6mo, our Santa Maria del Fiore. Well, well, a
mere glance; but I beseech you to leave a closer survey
till you have been shaved: I am quivering with the inspi-
ration of my art even to the very edge of my razor. Ah,
then, come round this way."

The mercurial barber seized the arm of the stranger,
and led him to a point, on the south side of the piazza,
from which he could see at once the huge dark shell ot tne
cupola, the slender soaring grace of Giotto's campanile,
and the quaint octagon of San Giovanni m front oi them,
showing its unique gates of storied bronze, which stul bore
3

34 ROMOLA.

the someAvhat dimmed glory of their original gilding. The
inlaid marbles were then fresher in their pink, and white,
and purple, than they are now, when the winters of four
centuries have turned their white to the rich ochre of well-
mellowed meerschaum; the facade of the cathedral did not
stand ignominious in faded stucco, but had upon it the
magnificent promise of the half-comj^leted marble inlaying
and statued riches, which Giotto had devised a hundred
and fifty years before; and as the campanile in all its
harmonious variety of color and from led the eyes upward,
high into the clear air of this April morning,' it seemed a
prophetic symbol, telling that human life must somehow
and some time shape itself into accord with that pure
as]3iring beauty.

But this was not the impression it appeared to produce
on the Greek. His eyes were irresistibly led upward, but
as he stood with his arms folded and his curls falling back-
ward, there was a slight touch of scorn on his lips, and
Avhen his eyes fell again they glanced round with a scanning
coolness which was rather piquing to Nello's Florentine
spirit.

"Well, my fine young man," he said, with some impa-
tience, "you seem to make as little of our Cathedral as if
you were the Angel Gabriel come straight from Paradise.
I should like to know if you have ever seen finer work
than our Giotto's tower, or any cupola that would not look
a mere mushroom by the side of Brunelleschi's there, or
any marbles finer or more cunningly wrought than these
that our Signoria got from far-off quarries, at a price that
would buy a dukedom. Come, now, have you ever seen
anything to equal them?"

"If you asked me that question with a scimiter at my
throat, after the Turkish fashion, or even your own
razor," said the young Greek, smiling gaily, and moving
on toward the gates of the Baptistery, " I dare say you
might get a confession of the true faith from me. " But
with my throat free from peril, I venture to tell you that
your buildings smack too much of Christian barbarism for
my taste. I have a shuddering sense of what there is
inside — hideous smoked Madonnas; flesliless saints in
mosaic, staring down idiotic astonishment and rebuke
from the apse; skin-clad skeletons hanging on crosses, or
stuck all over with arrows, or stretched on gridirons;
Avomcn and monks witli heads aside in perpetual lamenta
tion. I have seen enougli of those wrv-necked favorites

THE barber's shop. 35

of heaven at Constantinople. But what is this bronze
door rough with imagery? These women's figures seem
moulded in a different spirit from those starved and star-
ing saints I spoke of; these heads in high relief speak of a
human mind within them, instead of looking like an
index to perpetual spasms and colic."

"Yes, yes," said Xello, witli some triumph. ''1 think
we shall sliow you by-and-by that our Florentine art is not
in a state of barbarism. These gates, my fine young man,
were moulded half a century ago, by our Lorenzo Ghiberti,
when he counted hardly so many years as you do."

"Ah, I remember," said the stranger, turning away,
like one whose appetite for contemplation was soon satis-
fied. " I have heard that your Tuscan scul]itors and
painters have been studying the antique a little. But
with monks for models, and the legends of mad hermits
and martyrs for subjects, the vision of Olympus itself
Avould be of small use to them."

"I understand," said Nello, Avith a significant shrug, as
they walked along. " You are of the same mind as
Michele Marullo, ay, and as Angelo Poliziano himself, in
spite of his canonicate, when he relaxes himself a little
in my shop after his lectures, and talks of the gods awak-
ing from their long sleep and making the woods and
streams vital once more. But he rails against the Roman
scholars who want to make us all talk Latin again:
' My ears/ he says, ' are sufficiently flayed by the barljar-
isms of the learned, and if the vulgar are talk Latin I
would as soon have been in Florence the day they took to
beating all the kettles in the city because the bells were
not enough to stay the wrath of the saints.' Ah, Messer
Greco, if you want to know the flavor of our scholarship,
you must frequent my shop: it is the focus of Florentine
intellect, and in that sense the naval of the earth — as my
great predecessor, Burcliiello, said of his shop, on the
more frivolous pretension that his street of the Calimara
was the centre of our city. And here we are at the sign
of 'Apollo and the Razor.' Apollo, you see, is bestowing
the razor on the Triptolemus of our craft, the first reaper
of beards, the sublime Anonimo, whose mysterious iden-
tity is indicated by a shadowy hand."

"I see thou hast had custom already, Sandro," con-
tinued Nello, addressing a solemn-looking dark-eyed
youth, who made way for them on the threshold. "And
now make all clear for this signer to sit down. And pre-

36 ROMOLA. '

pare the finest-scented lather, for he has a learned and
handsome chin,"

"You have a pleasant little adytum there, I see," said
the stranger, looking through a latticed screen which
divided the shop from a room of about equal size, opening
into a still smaller walled enclosure, Avhere a few bays and
laurels surrounded a stone Hermes. " I suppose your con-
clave of eruditi meets there?"

"There, and not less in my shop," said Nello, leading
the way into the inner room, in which were some benches,
a table, with one book in manuscript and one printed in
capitals lying open upon it, a lute, a few oil-sketches, and
a model or two of hands and ancient masks. "For my
shop is a no less fitting haunt of the Muses, as you will
acknowledge when you feel the sudden illumination of
understanding and the serene vigor of inspiration that will
come to you with a clear chin. Ah! you can make that
lute discourse, I perceive. I, too, have some skill that
way, though the serenata is useless when daylight discloses
a visage like mine, looking no fresher than an apple that
has stood the winter. Biit look at that sketch: it is a
fancy of Piero de Oosimo's, a strange freakish painter,
who says he saw it by long looking at a mouldy wall,"

The sketch Nello pointed to represented three masks —
one a drunken laughing Satyr, another a sorrowing Mag-
dalen, and the third, which lay between them, the rigid,
cold face of a Stoic: the masks rested obliquely on the lap
of a little child, whose cherub features rose above them
with something of the supernal promise in the gaze which
painters had by that time learned to give to the Divine
Infant.

" A symbolical picture, I see," said the young Greek,
touching the lute while he spoke, so as to bring out a
slight musical murmur. "The child, perhaps, is the
Golden Age, wanting neither worship nor philosophy.
And the Golden Age can always come back as long as men
are born in the form of babies, and don't come into the
world in cassock or furred mantle. Or, the child may
mean the wise philosophy of Epicurus, removed alike from
the gross, the sad, and the severe,"

"Ah! everybody has his own interpretation for that
picture," said Nello; "and if you ask Piero himself what
he meant by it, he says his pictures are an appendix which
Messer J3omeneddio has been pleased to make to the
universe, and if any man is in doubt what they mean, he

THE barker's shop. 37

had better inquire of Holy Chui-cli. Ue has been asked
to pamt a picture after the sketch, but he puts his fino-ers
to his ears and shakes his head at that; the fancy is past
he says— a strange animal, our Piero. But noV all is
ready tor your initiation into the mysteries of the razor "
'I Mysteries they may well be called," continued the
barber, with rising spirits at the prospect of a loug mono-
logue, as he imprisoned the young Greek in the shroud-
like shaymg-cloth ; ''mysteries of Minerya and the
Graces. I get the flower of men^s thoughts, because
1 seize them m the first moment after shayin^ (Ah'
you wmce a little at the lather: it tends to the out-
lying limits of the nose, I admit. ) And that is what makes
the peculiar fitness of a barber's shop to become a resort
ot wit and learning. For, look now at a druggist's shop:
there is a dull conclaye a,t the sign of '' The Moor," that
pretends to rival mine; but what sort of inspiration, I
beseech you, can be got from the scent of nauseous yege-
table decoctions?— to say nothing of the fact that you no
sooner pass the threshold than you see a doctor of physic
like a gigantic spider disguised in fur and scarlet, waiting
tor Ins prey; or eyen see him blocking up the doorway
seated on a bony hack, inspecting saliya. (Your chin a
little eleyated, if it please you: comtemplate that angel
who IS blowing the trumpet at you from the ceiling I
had it painted expressly for the 'regulation of my clients'
chms. ) Besides, your druggist, who herborises and decocts,
is a man of prejudices: he has poisoned people according
to a system, and is obliged to stand up for his system in
order to justify the consequences. Kow a barber can be
dispassionate; the only thing he necessarily stands by is
the razor, always providing he is not an author. That was
the flaw m my great predecessor Burchiello: he was a poet
and had consequently a prejudice about his own poetry
1 haye escarped that; I saw yery early that authorsliii3 is a
narrowing business, in conflict with the liberal art of the
razor, which demands an impartial aftectiou for all men's
Chms. Ecco, Messer! the outline of your chin and lip is
IS clear as a maiden's; and no\v fix your mind on a knotty
question— ask yourself whether you are bound to sdcII Viroil
with an t or an e, and say if you do not feel an unwonted
clearness on the point. Only, if you decide for the /, keep
t to yourself till your fortune is made, for the e hath the
stronger following m Florence. Ah! I think I see a o-leam
01 still quicker wit m your eye. I have it on the authority

38 ROMOLA.

of our 3'oimg Niccolo Macchiavelli, liimself keen enough
to discern il pelo nelV novo, as we say, and a great lover of
delicate shaving, though his beard is hardly of two 3'ears'
date, that no sooner do the hairs begin to push tliemselves,
than he perceives a certain grossuess of apprehension
creeping over him/^

"■ Suppose j'ou let me look at myself,"" said the stranger,
laughing. " The happy effect on my intellect is perhaps
obstructed by a little doubt as to the effect on my appear-
ance."

"Behold yourself in this mirror, then: it is a Venetian
mirror from Murano, the true nosce fpipi<nm., as I have
named it, compared with which the finest mirror of steel
or silver is mere darkness. See now, how by diligent
shaving, the nether region of your face may preserve its
human outline, instead of presenting no distinction from
the physiognomy of a bearded owl or a Biirbary ape. I
have seen men whose beards liave so invaded their checks,
that one might have pitied tliem as the victims of a sad,
brutalizing chastisement befitting our Dante's Inferno, if
they had not seemed to strut with a strange triumph in
their extravagant hairiness."

" It seems to me," said the Greek, still looking into the
mirror, "that you have taken away some of my capital
with your razor — I mean a year or two of ;ige, which miglit
have won me more ready credit for my learning. Under
the inspection of a patron whose vision has grown some-
what dim, I shall have a jierilous resemblance to a maiden
of eighteen in the disguise of hose and Jerkin."

"Not at all," said Nello, proceeding to clip the too
extravagant curls; "your proportions are not those of a
maiden. And for your age, I myself remember seeing
Augelo Poliziano begin his lectures on the Latin language
when he had a younger beard than yours: and between
ourselves, his juvenile ugliness was not less signal than his
precocious scholarship. Whereas you — no, no, your age
is not against you; but between ourselves, let me hint to
you that your being a Greek, though it be only an Apulian
Greek, is not in your favor. Certain of our scholars hold
that your Greek learning is but a wayside, degenerate
plant until it has been transplanted into Italian brains,
and that now there is such a plentiful crop of the superior
quality, your native teachers are mere propagators of
degeneracy, Eccol your curls are now^ of the right pro-
portion to neck and shoulders; rise, Messer, and I will free

THE barber's shop. 39

you from the encumbrance of this cloth. Gnafe' I
almost advise you to retain the faded jerkin and fe a
little longer; they give you the air of a fallen prmce."

.But the question is," said the voung Greek leanino-
against he high back of a chair, and Returning xS
contempla ive admiration with a look of inquirin/anxietv-
; the question is, m what quarter I am to carry mf p Wlv
aii-^ so as to rise from the said fallen condition ^ ?f youi
to the G?' K r''^ ^f r"^» '^'^'' '^''' scholarly hostilily

r?f iewtp^ l'"' """^ r''' '''^' '"^ ^' ^ hospitable

retuge ±01 me, as you seemed to sav just now."

Fumpiano—not so fast," said :Nx41o, stickino- his

r'' "I'^vin'Lt'^' "^'1 r'''''^ '' ^'^^^^- *'"-tor

dice against rJil "'"'''"''^ ^""^ ^'°]^ ^^^^^ '^'^'^ '' M^reju-
nce against Greeks among us; and though, as a barber

arir;tat {hrrv'f"^'' ' f r ^^ P-'^^^lces, I mS
aamit that the Greeks are not alwavs such pretty vouno-.
sters as yourself: their erudition is often of an uncombed

rrSritliS'^tl' r' ^r"^^;?^' ^^^^^ ^ barbarointter:
ance ot Italian, that makes their converse hardlv more

iZadtT" A^iTti''' '' ' ^''''''' ^^ ^ state 7vino"
loquacity. And then, again, excuse me— we Florentines
have liberal ideas about speech, and consider that an
instrument which can flatter and promise ocleve'lva^
the tongue, must have been partly \iade for tl^se nur

10 Detray btill we have our limits, bevond whicli we pill
dissimulation treachery. But it is said "of the G^eks tha
their honesty begins at wliat is the hangino- pohit with ns
and that since the old Furies went to\.le%? on Chr '
lan Greek IS of so easy a conscience that iL^woiZ ntake a
steppmg-s one of his father's corpse. " ^ ""

so^S7^!::^^S^^^;-^tj^-;eeme^
I hear fn nw 'f ' ^'^ ^^'''^^^^^^ I am but repeating wha

with . L%'' f'^''^ ^^"°' "^ ^ »^^^'e mocking tone, an

?W !i ^®'*^0"sy has nothing to do with it: if you would
just change your opinion about leaven, and [iter your

40 ROMOLA.

Doxology a little, our Italian scholars would think it a
thousand years till they could give up their chairs to you.
Yes, yes; it is chiefly religious scruple, and partly also the
authority of a great classic — Juvenal, is it not? He, I
gather, had his bile as much stirred by the swarm of
Greeks as our Messer Angelo, who is fond of quoting some
passage about their incorrigible im2:)udence — andacia
perdita."

"Pooh! the passage is a compliment," said the Greek,
who had recovered himself, and seemed wise enough to take
the matter gaily —

" ' Ingenium velox, audacia perdita, sermo
Promptus, et IsaBO torrentior.'

A rapid intellect and ready eloquence may carry off a little
impudence."

"Assuredly," said Nello. "And since, as I see, you
know Latin literature as well as Greek, you will not fall
into the mistake of Giovanni Argiroi^ulo, who ran full tilt
against Cicero, and pronounced him all but a pumpkin-
head. For, let me give you one bit of advice, young man;
trust a barber who has shaved the best chins, and kept his
eyes and ears open for twenty years: oil your tongue well
when you talk of the ancient Latin writers, and give it an
extra dip when you talk of the modern. A wise Greek
may win favor among us; witness our excellent Demetrio,
who is loved by many, and not hated immoderately even by
the most renowned scholars."

'* I discern the wisdom of your advice so clearly," said
the Greek, with the bright smile which was continually
lighting u]) the fine form and color of his young face,
"that I will ask you for a little more. Who noAV, for
example, would be the most likely patron for me? Is
there a son of Lorenzo who inherits his tastes? Oristhci*e
any other wealthy Florentine especially addicted to pur-
chasing antique gems? I have a fine Cleopatra cut
in sardonyx, and one or two other intaglios and cameos,
both curious and beautiful, worthy of being added to the
cabinet of a prince. Happily, I had taken the precaution
of fastening them within the lining of my doublet before I
set out on my voyage. Moreover, I should like to raise a
small sum for my present need on this ring of mine"
(here he took out the ring and replaced it on his finger),
"if you could recommend me to any honest trafficker."

"Let us see, let us see," said Nello, perusing the floor,

THE barber's shop. 41

and walking up and down the length of his shop. " This
is no time to apply to Piero de Medici, though he has the
will to make such purchases if he could always spare
the money; but I think it is another sort of Cleopatra

that he covets most. Yes, yes, I have it. "What you

want is a man of wealth, and influence, and scholarly
tastes — not one of your learned j)orcupines, bristling all
over with critical tests, but one whose Greek and Latin
are of a comfortable laxity. And that man is Bartolom-
meo Scala, the secretary of our republic. He came to
Florence as a poor adventurer himself — a millers son — a
'branny monster,^ as he has been nicknamed by our honey-
lipped Poliziano, who agrees with him as well as my teeth
agree with lemon-juice. And, by the by, that may be a
reason why the secretary may be the more ready to do a
good turn to a strange scholar. For, between you and
me, hel giovcme — trust a barber who has shaved the best
scholars — friendliness is much such a steed as Ser Benghi's:
it will hardly show much alacrity unless it has got the
thistle of hatred under its tail. However, the secretary
is a man who'll keep his worv". to you, even to the halving
of a fennel-seed; and he is not unlikely to buy some of
your gems."

"But how am I to get at this great man?" said the
Greek, rather impatiently.

"I was coming to that," said Nello. "Just now every-
body of any public importance will be full of Lorenzo's
death, and a stranger may find it difficult to get any notice.
But in the meantime, I could take you to a man who, if
he has a mind, can help you to a chance of a favorable
interview with Scala sooner than anybody else in Flor-
ence— worth seeing for his own sake too, to say nothing of
his collections, or of his daughter Romola, who is as fair
as the Florentine lily before it got quarrelsome and turned
red."

"But if this father of the beautiful Eomola makes col-
lections, why should he not like to buy some of my gems
himself?"

jSTello shrugged his shoulders. " For two good reasons —
want of sight to look at the gems, and want of money to
pay for them. Our old Bardo de Bardi is so blind that he
can see no more of his daughter than, as he says, a glim-
mering of something briglit when she comes very near
him: doubtless her golden liair, which, as Messer Luigi
Pulci says of his Meridiana's, ' ragyia come stella per

4:2 KOMOLA.

sereno.' Ah! here come some cliouts of mine, and T
shouldn't wonder if one of them could serve your turn
about that ring."

CHAPTER IV.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS.

''Good-day, Messer Domenico,'" said Nello to the fore-
most of the two visitors who entered tlie shop, while he
nodded silently to the other. "You come as opportunely
as cheese or macaroni. Ah! you are in haste — wish to he
shaved without delay — ecco! And this is a morning when
every one has grave matter on his mind. Florence
orphaned — the very pivot of Italy snatched away — heaven
itself at a loss what to do next. Dime! Well, well; the sun
is nevertheless traveling on toward dinner-time again;
and, as I was saying, you come like cheese ready grated.
For this young stranger was wishing for an honorable
trader who would advance him a sum on a certain ring of
value, and if I had counted every goldsmith and money-
lender in Florence on my fingers, I couldn't have found a
better name than Menico Cennini. Besides, he hath other
ware in which you deal — Greek learning, and young eyes —
a double implement which you printers are always in need
of."

The grave elderly man, son of that Bernardo Cennini,
who, twenty years before, having heard of the new jn-ocess
of printing carried on by Germans, had cast his own ty])es
in Florence, remained necessarily in latliered silence and
passivity while Xello showered this talk in his ears, but
turned a slow sideway gaze on the stranger.

"This fine young man has unlimited Greek, Latin, or
Italian at your service," continued Nello, fond of interpret-
ing by very ample paraphrase. " He is as great a wonder
of juvenile learning as Francesco Filelfo or our own incom-
parable Poliziano. A second Guarino, too, for he has had
the misfortune to be shipwrecked, and has doubtless lost a
store of precious manuscrijjts tbat might have contributed
some correctness even to your correct editions, Domenico.
Fortunately, he has rescued a few gems of rare value. His
name is — you said your name, Messer, was ? "

FIRST IMPRESSION'S. 43

" Tito Melema," said the stranger, slipping the ring
from his finger, and presenting it to Cennini, whom IsqWo,
not less rapid with his razor than with his tongue, had
now released from the shaving-cloth.

Meanwhile the man who had entered the shop in com-
pany with the goldsmith— a tall figure, about fiftv, with a
short trimmed beard, wearing an old felt hat and a thread-
bare mantle— had kept his eye fixed on the Greek, and
now said abruptly —

"Young man, I am painting a picture of Sinon deceiv-
mg old Priam, and I should be glad of your face for mv
Sinon, if you'd give me a sitting,"

Tito Melema started and looked round with a pale aston-
ishment in his face as if at a sudden accusation; but Nello
left him no time to feel at a loss for an answer: "Piero,"
said the barber, "thou art the most extraordinary com-
pound of humors and fancies ever packed into a human
skin. What trick wilt thou play with the fine visage of
this young scholar to make it suit thy traitor? Ask him
rather to turn his eyes upward, and thou mayst make a
Saint Sebastian of him that will draw troops of devout
women, or, if thou art in a classical vein, put myrtle
about his curls and make him a young Bacchus, or say
rather a PhcBbus Apollo, for his face is as warm and brigl^t
as a summer morning; it made me his friend in the space
of a 'credo.' "

"Ay, Nello," said the painter, speaking with abrupt
pauses; " and if thy tongue can leave off its everlasting
chirping long enough for thy understanding to consider
the matter, thou mayst see that thou has just shown the
reason why the face of Messere will suit my traitor. A
perfect traitor should have a face which vice can write no
marks on— lips that will lie with a dimpled smile— eyes of
such agatelike brightness and depth that no infaniy can
dull them— cheeks that will rise from a murder and not
look haggard. I say not this young man is a traitor: I
mean, he has a face that would make him the more perfect
traitor if he had the heart of one, which is saying neither
more nor less than that he has a beautiful face, informed
with rich young blood, that will be nourished enough by
food, and keep its color without much help of virtue. He
may have the heart of a hero along witli it; I aver nothing
to the contrary. Ask Domenico there if tlie lapidaries can
always tell a gem by the sight alone. And now Fm going
to put the tow in my ears, for thy chatter and the bells

44 ROMOLA.

together are more than I can endure: so say no more to
me, but trim my beii^rd/'

Witli these last words Piero (called "di Cosimo," from
his master, Cosimo Eosselli) drew out two bits of tow,
stuffed them in his ears, and placed himself in the chair
before Nello, who shrugged his shoulders and cast a gri-
macing look of intelligence at the Greek, as much as to
say, " A whimsical fellow, you perceive! Everybody holds
his speeches as mere Jokes."

Tito, who had stood transfixed, with his long dark eyes
resting on the unknown man who had addressed him so
equivocally, seemed recalled to his self-command by Piero's
change of position and apparently satisfied with his expla-
nation, was again giving his attention to Cennini, who
presently said —

'■'This is a curious and valuable ring, young man. This
intaglio of the fish with the crested serpent above it, in
the black stratum of the onyx, or rather nicolo, is well
shown by the surrounding blue of the upper stratum. The
ring has, doubtless, a liistory?" added Cennini, looking up
keenly at the young stranger.

"Yes, indeed," said Tito, meeting the scrutiny very
frankly. "The ring was found in Sicily, and I have
understood from those who busy themselves with gems
and sigils, that both the stone and intaglio are of virtue to
make the wearer fortunate, especially at sea, and also to
restore to him whatever he may have lost. But," he con-
tinued, smiling, " though I have worn it constantly since
I quitted Greece, it has not made me altogether fortunate
at sea, you perceive, unless I am to count escape from
drowning as a sufficient proof of its virtue. It remains to
be seen whether my lost chests will come to light; but to
lose no chance of such a result, Messer, I will pray 3^ou
only to hold the ring for a short space as pledge for a small
sum far beneath its value, and I will redeem it as soon as I
can dispose of certain other gems which are secured within
my doublet, or indeed as soon as I can earn something by
any scholarly emjiloyment, if I may be so fortunate as to
meet with such."

" That may be seen, young man, if you will come Avith
me," said Cennini. "My brother Pietro, who is a better
judge of scholarship than I, will perhaps be able to supply
you with a task that may test your capabilities. Mean-
while, take back your ring until I can hand you the neces-
sary florins, and, if it please you, come along with me."

FIRST IMPRESSIONS. 45

''Yes, yes." said Nello, ''go with Messer Domenico, you
cannot go in better company; he was born under the con-
stellation that gives a man skill, riches, and integrity,
whatever that constellation may be, which is of the less
consequence because babies can't choose their own horo-
scopes, and, indeed, if they could, there might be an
inconvenient rush of babies at particular epochs. Besides,
our PhcBnix, the incomparable Pico, has shown that your
horoscopes are all a nonsensical dream — which is the less
troublesome opinion. Addio! hel giovane! don't forget to
come back to me."

"No fear of that," said Tito, beckoning a farewell, as
he turned round his bright face at the door. "You are
to do me a great service: — that is the most positive security
for your seeing me again."

"Say what thou wilt, Piero," said Nello, as the young-
stranger disappeared, "I shall never look at such an out-
side as that without taking it as a sign of a lovable nature.
Why, thou wilt say next that Lionardo, whom thou art
always raving about, ought to have made his Judas as
beautiful as St. John! But thou art deaf as the top of
Mount Morello with that accursed tow in thy ears. Well,
well: Pll get a little more of this young man's histoiy
from him before I take him to Bardo Bardi."

CHAPTER V.

THE BLIXD SCHOLAR AND HIS DAUGHTER.

The Via de Bardi, a street noted in the history of
Florence, lies in Oltrarno, or that portion of the city
which clothes the southern " k of the river. It extends
from the Ponte Vecchio to the Plaza de Mozzi at the head
of the Ponte alle Grazie; its right-hand line of houses and
walls being backed by the rather steep ascent which in the
fifteenth century was known as the hill of Bogoli, the
famous stone-quarry whence the city got its pavement — of
dangerously unstable consistence when penetrated by rains;
its left-hand buildings flanking the river and making on
their northern side a length of quaint, irregularly-pierced
facade, of which the waters gave a softened loving reflec-
tion as the sun begins to decline toward tlie western

46 ROMOLA.

heights. But quaint as these buildings are, some of them
seem to the historical memory a too modern substitute for
the famous houses of the Bardi family, destroyed by pop-
ular rage in the middle of the fourteenth century.

They were a proud and energetic stock, these Bardi;
conspicuous among those who clutched the sword in the
earliest world-famous quarrels of Florentines with Flor-
entines, when the narrow streets were darkened with the
high towers of the nobles, and when the old tutelar
god Mars, as he saw the gutters reddened with neigh-
bors' blood, might well have smiled at the centuries of
lip-service paid to his rival, the Baptist. But the Bardi
hands were of the sort that not only clutch the sword-hilt
with vigor, but love the more delicate pleasure of fingering-
minted metal: they were matched, too, with true Floren-
tine eyes, capable of discerning that power was to be won
by other means than by rending and riving, and by the
middle of the fourteenth century we find them risen from
their original condition of popolani to be possessors, by
purchase, of lands and strongholds, and the feudal dignity
of Counts of Vernio, disturbing to the jealousy of their
republican fellow-citizens. These lordly purchases are
explained by our seeing the Bardi disastrously signalized
only a few years later as standing in the very front of
European commerce — the Christian Eothschilds of that
time — undertaking to furnish specie for the wars of our
Edward III., and having revenues ''in kind "made over
to them; especially in wool, most precious of freights for
Florentine galleys. Their august debtor left them with
an august deficit, and alarmed Sicilian creditors made a
too sudden demand for the payment of deposits, causing a
ruinous shock to the credit of the Bardi and of associated
houses, which was felt as a commercial calamity along all
the coasts of the Mediterranean. But, like the more mod-
ern bankrupts, they did not, for all that, hide their heads
in humiliation; on the contrary, they seemed to have held
them higher than ever, and to have been among the most
arrogant of those grandees, who under certain noteworthy
circumstances, open to all who will read the honest pages
of Giovanni Villani, drew upon themselves the exaspera-
tion of the armed people in 1343. The Bardi, who had
made themselves fast in their street betAveen the two
bridges, kept these narrow inlets, like panthers at bay,
against the oncoming gonfalons of the people, and were
only made to give way by an assault from the hill behind

THE BLIXD SCHOLAR. 47

them. Their houses by the river, to tlie number of twenty-
two {palagi e case grancli), were sacked and burned, and
many among the chief of those who bore ihe Bardi name
were driven from tlie city. But an old Florentine family
was many-rooted, and we find the Bardi maintaining
importance and rising again and again to the surface of
Florentine affairs in a more or less creditable manner,
implying an untold family history that would have included
even more vicissitudes and contrasts of dignity and dis-
grace, of wealth and poverty, than are usually seen on
the background of wide kinship.* But the Bardi never
resumed their proprietorship in the old street on the
banks of the river, which in 1492 had long been associated
with other names of mark, and especially with the Xeri,
who possessed a considerable range of houses on the site
toward the hill.

In one of these Neri houses their lived, however, a
descendent of the Bardi, and of that very branch which a
century and a half before had become Counts of Vernio;
a descendant who had inherited the old family pride and
energy, the old love of pre-eminence, the old desire to leave
a lasting track of his footsteps on the fast-whirling earth.
But the family passions lived on in him under altered con-
ditions: this descendant of the Bardi was not a man swift
in street warfare, or one who loved to play the signer, for-
tifying strongholds and asserting the right to hang vassals,
or a merchant and usurer of keen daring, who delighted
in the generalship of wide commercial schemes: he was a
man with a deep-veined hand, cramped by much copying
of manuscripts, who ate sparing dinners and wore thread-
bare clothes, at first from choice and at last from necessity;
Avho sat among his books and his marble fragments of the
past, and saw them only by the light of those far-off
younger days which still shone in his memory: he was a
moneyless, Ijlind old scholar — the Bardo de Bardi to whom
iV^ello, the barber, had promised to introduce the young
Greek, Tito Melema.

The house in which Bardo lived was situated on the side
of the street nearest the hill, and was one of those large

♦ A sign that such contrasts were peculiarly frequent in Florence, is the
fact that Saint Antonine, Prior of San Marco and afterward archbishop, in
the first half of this fifteenth centui-y, founded the society of Huonuomini
di San Martino (Good Men of St. Martin) \v\X\\ the main object of succoring
the pnveri vergoynml — in other words, paupers of g-ood family. In the
records of the famous Panciatichi family we find a certain Girolamo in this
century who was reduced to such a state of poverty that he was obliged to
seek charity for tlie mere means of sustaining life, though other members
of his family were enormously wealthj-.

48 EOMOLA.

sombre masses of stone building pierced by comparatively
small windows, and surmounted by what may be called a
roofed terrace or loggia, of which there are many examples
still to be seen in the venerable city. Grim doors, with
conspicuous scrolled hinges, having high up on each side
of them a small window defended by iron bars, opened on
a groined entrance court, empty of everything but a mas-
sive lamp-iron suspended from the centre of the groin. A
smaller grim door on the left hand admitted to the stone
staircase, and the rooms on the ground floor. These last
were used as a warehouse by the proprietor; so was the first
floor; and both were filled with precious stores, destined
to be carried, some perhaps to the banks of the Scheldt,
some to the shores of Africa, some to the isles of the Egean,
or to the banks of the Euxine. Maso, the old serving-
man, when he returned from the Mercato with the stock of
cheap vegetables, had to make his slow way up to the
second story before he reached the door of his master,
Bardo, through which we are about to enter only a few
mornings after Nello's conversation with the Greek.

We follow Maso across the antechamber to the door on
the left hand, through which we pass as he opens it. He
merely looks in and nods, while a clear young voice says,
"Ah, you are come back, Maso. It is well. We have
wanted nothing."

The voice came from the farther end of a long, spacious
room, surrounded with shelves, on which books and antiq-
uities were arranged in scrupulous order. Here and there,
on separate stands in front of the shelves, were placed a
beautiful feminine torso; a headless statue, with an uplifted
muscular arm wielding a bladeless sword; rounded, dim-
pled, infantine limbs severed from the trunk, inviting the
lips to kiss the cold marble; some well-preserved Roman
busts; and two or three vases from Magna Grecia. A large
table in the centre was covered with antique bronze lamps
and small vessels in dark pottery. The color of these objects
was chiefly pale or sombre: the vellum bindings, with their
deep-ridged backs, gave little relief to the marble, livid
with long burial; the once splendid patch of carpet at the
farther end of the room had long been worn to dimness;
the dark bronzes wanted sunlight upon them to bring out
their tinge of green, and the sun was not yet high enough
to send gleams of brightness through the narrow windows
that looked on the Via de Bardi.

The only spot of bright color in the .room was made by

THE BLIND SCHOLAK. 49

the hair of a tall maiden of seventeen or eighteen, who was
standing before a carved leggio, or reading-desk, such as is
often seen in the choirs of Italian churches. The hair
was of a reddish gold color, enriched by an unbroken small
ripple, such as may be seen in the sunset clouds on grandest
autumnal evenings. It was confined by a black fillet above
her small ears, from which it rippled forward again, and
made a natural veil for her neck above her square-cut gown
of black rascia, or serge. Her eyes were bent on a large
volume placed before her: one long white hand rested on
the reading-desk, and the other clasped the back of her

-pQ4-l-» pv'c cliBjir

The blind father sat with head uplifted and turned a
little aside toward his daughter, as if he were looking at
her. His delicate paleness, set off by the black velvet cap
which surmounted his drooping white hair, made all the
more perceptible the likeness between his aged features
and those of the young maiden, whose cheeks were also
without any tinge of the rose. There was the same refine-
ment of brow and nostril in both, counterbalanced by a
full though firm mouth and powerful chin, which gave an
expression of proud tenacity and latent impetuousness:
an expression carried out in the backward poise of the
girl's head, and the grand line of her neck and shoulders.
It was a type of face of which one could not venture to say
whether it would inspire love or only that unwilling admi-
ration which is mixed with dread: the question must be
decided by the eyes, which often seem charged with a
more direct message from the soul. But the eyes of the
father had long been silent, and the eyes of the daughter
were bent on the Latin pages of Politian's '' Miscellanea,"
from which she was reading aloud at the eightieth chapter,
to the following effect : —

" There was a certain nymph of Thebes named Chariclo,
especially dear to Pallas; and this nymph was the mother
of Teiresias. But once when in the heat of summer, Pallas,
in company with Chariclo, was bathing her disrobed limbs
in the Heliconian Hippocrene, it happened that Teiresias
coming as a hunter to quench his thirst at the same foun-
tain, inadvertently beheld Minerva unveiled, and immedi-
ately became blind. For it is declared in the Satarnian
laws, that he who beholds the gods against their will,

atone for it by a heavy penalty. When Teiresias had

fallen into this calamity, Pallas, moved by the tears of
Chariclo, endowed him with prophecy and length of days,
4

50 EOMOLA.

and even caused his prudence and \visdom to continue
after he had entered among the shades, so that an oracle
spake from his tomb: and she gave him a staff, where-
with, as by a guide, he might Avalk Avithout stumbling.

And hence, Nonnus, in the fifth book of the * Dionysiaca,'
introduces Action exclaiming that he calls Teiresias happy,
since, without dying, and with the loss of his eyesight
merely, he had beheld Minerva unveiled, and thus, though
blind, could forevermore carry her image in his soul."

At this point in the reading, the daughter's hand sli})pcd
from the back of the chair and met her father's, which he
had that moment uplifted; but she had not looked round,
and was going on, though with a voice a little altered by
some suppressed feeling, to read the Greek quotation from
Xonnus, when the old man said —

" Stay, Romola; reach me my own copy of Xonnus.
It is a more correct copy than any in Poliziano's hands,
for I made emendations in it which have not yet been
communicated to any man. I finished it in 1477, when
my sight was fast failing me."

Romola walked to the farther end of the room, with the
queenly step which was the simple action of her tall, finel}'-
Avrought frame, without the slightest conscious adjustment
of herself.

"Is it in the right place, Eomola?" asked Bardo, who
was perpetually seeking the assurance that the outward
fact continued to correspond with the image which lived
to the minutest detail in his mind.

"Yes, father; at the west end of the room, on the
third shelf from the bottom, behind the bust of Hadrian,
above Apollonius Rhodius and Callimachus, and below
Lucan and Silicus Italicus."

As Romola said this, a fine ear would have detected in
her clear voice and distinct utterance, a faint suggestion
of weariness struggling with habitual patience. But as
she approached her father and saw his arms stretched out
a little with nervous excitement to seize the volume, her
hazel eyes filled with pity; she hastened to lay the book
on his laji, and kneeled down by him, looking up at him
as if she believed that the love in her face must surely
make its way through the dark obstruction that shut out
everything else. At that moment the doubtful attractive-
ness of Romola's face, in which pride and passion seemed
to be quivering in the lialanee with native refinement and
intelligence, was transfigured to the most lovable woman-

THK BLIXD SCHOLAR. 51

liuess b}' mingled pity and affection: it was evident that
the deepest fount of feeling within her had not yet
wrought its way to the less changeful features, and only
found its outlet through her eyes.

But the father, unconscious of that soft radiance, looked
flushed and agitated as his hand explored the edges and
back of the large book.

''The vellum is yellowed in these thirteen years,
Eomola."

"Yes, father,"' said Romola, gently; "but your letters
at the back are dark and plain still — fine Roman letters;
and the Greek character," she continued, laying the book
open on her father's knee, "is more beautiful than that
of any of your bought manuscripts."

"Assuredly, child," said Bardo, passing his finger
across the page, as if he hoped to discriminate line and
margin. " What hired amanuensis can be equal to the
scribe who loves the words that grow under his hand, and
to whom an error or indistinctness in the text is more
painful than a sudden darkness or obstacle across his path?
And even these mechanical printers who threaten to make
learning a base and vulgar thing — even they must depend
on the manuscript over which we scholars have bent with
that insight into the poet's meaning which is closely akin
to the me)is divinior of the poet himself; unless they
would flood the world with grammatical falsities and
inexplicable anomalies that would turn the very fountain
of Parnassus into a deluge of poisonous mud. Bat find
the passage in tlie fifth book, to which Poliziano refers —
I know it very well."

Seating herself on a low stool, close to her father's
knee, Romola took the' book on her lap and read the four
verses containing the exclamation of Actseon.

"It is true, Romola," said Bardo, when she had fin-
ished; "It is a true conception of the poet; for what i^
that grosser, narrower light by which men behold merely
the petty scene around them, compared with that far-
stretching, lasting liglit which spreads over centuries of
thought, and over the life of nations, and makes clear to
us the minds of the immortals who have reaped the great
harvest and left us to glean in their furrows? For me,
Romola, even when I could see, it was with the great dead
that I lived; while the living often seemed to me mere
spectres — shadows dispossessed of true feeling and intel-
ligence; and unlike tliose Lamia?, to whom Poliziano, with

62 ROMOLA.

that superficial ingenuity which I do not deny to him,
compares our inquisitive Florentines, because they put on
their eyes when they went abroad, and took them off when
they got home again, I have returned from the converse
of the streets as from a forgotten dream, and have sat
down among my books, saying with Petrarca, the modern
who is least unworthy to be named after the ancients,
/Libri medullitus delectant, colloquuntur, consulunt, et
viva quadam nobis atque arguta familiaritate junguntur.' "

" And in one thing you are happier than your favorite
Petrarca, father," said Romola, affectionataly humoring
the old man's disposition to dilate in this way; "for he
used to look at his copy of Homer and think sadly that the
Greek was a dead letter to him: so far, he had the inward
blindness that you feel is worse than your outward
blindness."

" True, child, for I carry within me the fruits of that
fervid study which I gave to the Greek tongue under the
teaching of tlie younger Crisolora, and Filelfo, and Argi-
ropulo; though that great work in which I had desired to
gather, as into a firm web, all the threads that my research
had laboriously disentangled, and which would have been
the vintage of my life, was cut off by the failure of my
sight and my want of a fitting coadjutor. For the sus-
tained zeal and unconquerable patience demanded from
those who would tread the unbeaten paths of knoAvledge
are still less reconcilable with the wandering, vagrant pro-
pensity of the feminine mind than Avith the feeble powers
of the feminine body."

" Father," said Romola, with a sudden flush and in an
injured tone, " I read anything you wish me to read; and
I will look out any passages for you, and make whatever
notes you want."

" Bardo shook his head, and smiled with a bitter sort of
pity. ''As well try to be a pentatlilos and perform all the
five feats of the palaestra with the limbs of a nymph.
Have I forgotten thy fainting in tlie mere search for the
references I needed to explain a single passage of Calli-
machus?"

" But, father, it was the weight of the books, and Maso
can help me; it was not want of attention and patience.^

Bardo shook his head again. " It is not mere bodily
organs that I want: it is the sharp edge of a young mind
to pierce the way for my somewhat blunted faculties. For
blindness acts like a dam, sending the streams of thought

THE BLIND SCHOLAK. 53

backward along the already-traveled channels and hinder-
ing the course onward. If my son had not forsaken me,
deluded by debasing fanatical dreams, worthy, only of an
energumen whose dwelling is among tombs, I might havej
gone on and seen my path broadening to the end of my '
life; for he was a youth of great promise. But it has closed
in now," the old man continued, after a short pause;
"it has closed in now — all but the narrow track he has left
me to tread — alone in my blindness."

Eomola started from her seat, and carried away tlie large
volume to its place again, stung too acutely by her fatlier's
last words to remain motionless as well us silent; and
when she turned away from the shelf again, slie remained
standing at some distance from liim, stretching her arms
downward and clasping her fingers tightly as she looked
Avitli a sad dreariness in her young face at the lifeless
objects around her — the parchment backs, the unchanging
mutilated marble, the bits of obsolete bronze and clay.

Bardo, though usually susceptible to Romola's move-
ments and eager to trace them, was now too entirely
preoccupied by the pain of rankling memories to notice
her departure from his side.

" Yes," he went on, " with my son to aid me, I might
have had my due share in the triumphs of this century:
the names of the Bardi, father and son, might have been
held reverently on the lips of scholors in the ages to come;
not on account of frivolous verses or philosophical treatises,
which are superfluous and presumptuous attempts to imi-
tate the inimitable, such as allure vain men like Panhormita
and from whicli even the admirable Poggio did not keep
himself sufficiently free; but because we should have given
a lamp whereby men might have studied the supreme
productions of the past. For why is a young man like
Poliziano (who was not yet born when I was already held
worthy to maintain a discussion with Thomas of Sarzana) to
have a glorious memory as a commentator on the Pandects
— why is Ficino, whose Latin is an offense to me, and who
wanders purblind among the superstitious fancies that
marked the decline at once of art, literature and philoso-
phy, to descend to posterity as the very high priest of
Platonism, while I, who am more than their equal, have
not effected anything but scattered work, which will be
appropriated by other men. Why? but because my son,
whom I had brought up to replenish my ripe learning
with young enterprise, left me and all liberal pursuits that

54 ROMOLA.

lie miglit lash himself and howl at midnight with besotted
friars — ^that he might go wandering on pilgrimages befit-
ting men who know of no past older than the missal and
the crucifix? — left me when the night was already be-
ginning to fall on me."

In these last words the old man's voice, which had risen
high in indignant protest, fell into a tone of reproach so
tremulons and plaintive that Komola, turning her eyes
again toward the blind aged face, felt her heart swell
with forgiving pity. She seated herself by her father
again, and placed her hand on his knee — too proud to
obtrude consolation in words that might seem like a vindi-
cation of her own value, yet wishing to comfort him by
some sign of her j^resence.

'"Yes, Eomola," said Bardo, automatically letting his
left hand, with its massive prophylactic rings, fall a little
too heavily on the delicate blue-veined back of the girl's
right, so that she bit her lip to prevent herself from start-
ing. "If even Florence only is to remember me, it can
but be on the same ground that it will remember Niccolo
Niccoli — because I forsook the vulgar pursuit of wealth in
commerce that I might devote myself to collecting the
precious remains of ancient art and wisdom; and leave
them, after the example of the munificent Eomans, for an
everlasting possession to my fellow-citizens. But why do
I say Florence only? If Florence remembers me, will not

the world, too, remember me? and yet," added Bardo,

after a short pause, his voice falling again into a saddened
key, " Lorenzo's untimely death has raised a new difficulty,
I had his promise — I should have had his bond — that my
collection should always bear my name and should never
be sold, though the harpies might clutch everything else;
but there is enough for them — there is more than enough —
and for thee, too, Komola, there will be enough. Be-
sides, thou wilt marry; Bernardo rejiroaches me that I do
not seek a fitting ])arcntado for thee, and we will delay no
longer, we will think about it."

" No, no, father; what could you do? besides, it is
useless: wait till some one seeks me," said Romola, hastily.

"Nay, my child, that is not the paternal duty. It was
not so held by the ancients, and in this respect Florentines
have not degenerated from their ancestral customs."

"But I will study diligently," said Romola, her e3'es
dilating with anxiety. "I will become as learned as Cas-
sandra Fedcle: I will try and be as useful to you as if I

THE BLIND SCHOLAR. 00

had been a boj',, and then perhaps some great schohar will
want to marry me, and will not mind about a dowry; and
he will like to come and live with yon, and he will be to
yon in j)lace of my brother; and yon will not be sorry that
I was a daughter."

There was a rising sob in Eomola's voice as she said the
last words, which touched the fatherly fiber in Bardo. He
stretched his hand upward a little in search of her golden
hair, and as she placed her head under his hand, he gently
stroked it, leaning toward her as if his eyes discerned some
glimmer there.

'''Nay, Romola mia, I said not so; if I have pronounced
an anathema on a degenerate and ungrateful son, I said
not that I could wish thee other than the sw-eet daughter
thou hast been to me. For what son could have tended
me so gently in the frequent sickness I have had of late?
And even in learning thou art not, according to thy meas-
ure, contemptible. Something, perhaps, were to be wished
in thy capacity of attention and memory, not incompatible
even with the feminine mind. But as Calcondila bore
testimony, when he aided me to teach thee, thou hast a
ready apprehension, and even a wide-glancing intelligence.
And thou hast a man's nobility of soul: thou hast never
fretted me with thy petty desires as thy mother did. It is
true, I have been careful to keep thee aloof from the
debasing influence of thy own sex, with their sparrow-like
frivolity and their enslaving superstition, except, indeed,
from that of our cousin Brigida, who may well serve as a
scarecrow and a warning. And though — since I agree with
the divine Petrarca, when he declares, quoting the 'Aulu-
laria ' of Plautus, who again was indebted for the truth to
the supreme Greek intellect, 'Optimam foeminam nullam
esse, alia licet alia pejor sit ' — I cannot boast that thou art
entirely lifted out of that lower category to which Xature
assigned thee, nor even that in erudition thou art on a
par with the more learned women of this age; thou art,
nevertheless — yes, Romola mia," said the old man, his
pedantry again melting into tenderness, " thou art my
sweet daughter, and thy voice is as the lower notes of the
flute, ' duleis, durabilis, clara, pura, secans aera et auribus
sedens,' according to the choice words of Quintiliau; and
Bernardo tells me thou art fair, and thy hair is like the
brightness of the morning, and indeed it"^seems to me that
I discern some radiance from thee. Ah I I know how all
else looks in this room, but thv form I onlv guess at. Thou

56 ROMOLA.

art no longer the little woman six years old, that faded for
me into darkness; thy art tall, and thy arm is but little
below mine. Let us walk together."

The old man rose, and Romola, soothed by these beams
of tenderness, looked happy again as she drew his arm
within hers, and placed in his right hand the stick which
rested at the side of his chair. While Bardo had been
sitting, he had seemed hardly more than sixty: his face,
though pale, had that refined texture in which wrinkles
and lines are never deep; but now that he began to walk,
he looked as old as he really was — rather more than
seventy; for his tall, spare frame had the student's stoop
of the shoulders, and he stepped with the undecided gait
of the blind.

" No, Romola," he said, pausing against the bust of
Hadrian, and passing his stick from the right to the left
that he might explore the familiar outline with a "seeing
hand." "There will be nothing else to preserve my
memory and carry down my name as a member of the
great republic of letters — nothing but my library and my
collection of antiquities. And they are choice," continued
Bardo, pressing the bust and speaking in a tone of insist-
ence. The collections of Niccolo I know were larger; but
take any collection which is the work of a single man —
that of the great Boccaccio even — mine vvill surpass it.
That of Poggio was contemptible compared with mine. It
will be a great gift to unborn scholars. And there is
nothing else. For even if I were to yield to the wish of
Aldo Manuzio, when he sets up his press at Venice, and
give him the aid of my annotated manuscripts, I know
well what would be the result: some other scholar's name
would stand on the title-page of the edition — some scholar
who would have fed on my lioney, and then declared in
his preface that he had gathered it all himself fresh from
Hymcttus. Else, why have I refused the loan of many an
annotated codex? why have I refused to make public any
of my translations? why? but because scholarship is a
system of licensed robbery, and your man in scarlet and
furred robe who sits in judgment on thieves, is himself a
thief of the thoughts and the fame that belong to his
fellows. But against that roljbery Bardo de Bardi shall
struggle — though blind and forsaken he shall struggle. I
too have a right to be remembered — as great a right as
Pontaiius or Merula, whose names will be foremost on the
lips of posterity, because they sought patronage and found

THE BLIXD SCHOLAK. 07

it; because they had tongues that could flatter, and blood
that was used to be nourished from the client's basket. I
have a right to be remembered.''

The old man's voice had become at once loud and trem-
ulous, and a pink flush overspread his proud, delicately-cut
features, while the habitually raised attitude of his head
gave the idea that behind the curtain of his blindness he
saw some imaginary high tribunal to which he was appeal-
ing against the injustice of Fame.

Komola was moved with sympathetic indignation, for in
her nature too there lay the same large claims, and the
same spirit of struggle against their denial. She tried to
calm her father by a still prouder word than his.

" Nevertheless, father, it is a great gift of the gods to be
born with a hatred and contempt of all injustice and mean-
ness. Yours is a higher lot, never to have lied and truck-
led, than to have shared honors won by dishonor. There
is strength in scorn, as there was in the martial fury by
which men became insensible to wounds."

" It is well said, Romola. It is a Promethean word thou
hast uttered," answered Bardo, after a little interval in
which he had begun to lean on his stick again, and to
walk on. ''And I indeed am not to be pierced by the
shafts of Fortune. My armor is the (BS triplex of a clear
conscience, and a mind nourished by the precepts of philos-
ophy. 'For men,' says Epictetus, 'are disturbed not by
things themselves, but by their opinions or thoughts con-
cerning those things.' And again, ' whosoever will be free,
let him not desire or dread that which it is in the power of
others either to deny or inflict: otherwise, he is a slave.'
And of all such gifts as are dependent on the caprice of
fortune or of men, I have long ago learned to say, with
Horace — who, however, is too wavering in his philosophy,
vacillating between the precepts of Zeno and the less
worthy maxims of Epicurus, and attempting, as we say,
' duabus sellis sedere ' — concerning snch accidents, I say,
with the pregnant brevity of the poet —

' Sunt qui non habeant, est qui non curat habere.'

He is referring to gems, and purple, and other insignia of
wealth; but I may aj^ply his words not less justly to the
tributes men pay us with their lips and their pens, which
are also matters of purchase, and often with base coin.
Yes, ' inanis ' — hollow, empty — is the epithet justly
bestowed on Fame."

58 ROMOLA.

They made the tour of the room in silence after this;
but Bardo's lip-born maxims were as jjowerless over the
passion which had been moving him, as if they had been
written on parchment and hung round his neck in a sealed
bag; and he broke forth again in a new tone of insistence.

''InanisV yes, if it is a lying fame; but not if it is the
just meed of labor and a great purpose. I claim my right: it
IS not fair that the work of my brain and my hands should
not be a monument to me — it is not just that my labor
should bear the name of another man. It is but little to
ask,'' the old man went on bitterly, " that my name
should be over the door — that men should own themselves
debtors to the Bardi Library in Florcnee. They will
speak coldly of me, perhaps: 'a diligent collector and
transcriber,' they will say, 'and also of some critical ingen-
uity, but one who could hardly be conspicuous in an age
so fruitful in illustrious scholars. Yet he merits our pity,
for in the latter years of his life he was blind, and his
only son, to whose education he had devoted his best

years ' Nevertheless, my name will be remembered,

and men will honor me: not with the breath of flattery,
purchased by mean bribes, but because I have lal^ored, and
because my labors will remain. Debts! I know there are
debts; and there is thy dowry, Romola, to be paid. But
there must be enough — or, at least, there can lack but a
small sum, such as the Signoria might well provide. And
if Lorenzo had not died, all would have been secured and
settled. But now "

At this moment Maso opened the door, and advancing
to his master, announced that Nello, the barber, had
desired him to say, that lie was come with the Greek
scholar whom he had asked leave to introduce.

" It is well," said the old man. " Bring them in."

Bardo, conscious that he looked more dependent when
he was walking, liked alway to be seated in the presence
of strangers, and Romola, without needing to be told,
conducted him to his chair. She was standing by him at
her full height, in quiet majestic self-possession, when the
visitors entered; and the most penetrating observer would
hardly have divined that this proud pale jiace, at the
slightest touch on the fibres of affection or pity, could
become passionate with tenderness, or that this woman,
who imj)oscd a certain awe on those who approached her,
was in a state of girlish simplicity and ignorance concern-
ing the world outside her father's books.

DAWNING HOPES. 5!)

CHAPTER Vr.

DAAVXIXG HOPES.

When Maso opened the door again, and ushered in the
two visitors, Xello, first making a deep reverence to Eomola,
gently pushed Tito before him, and advanced with him
toward her father.

" Messer Bardo," he said, in a more measured and respect-
ful tone than was usual with him, "I have the honor of
presenting to you the Greek scholar, who has been eager
to have speech of you, not less from the report I have
made to him of your learning and your priceless collections,
than because of the furtherance your patronage may give
him under the transient need to Avhicli he has been reduced
by shipwreck. His name is Tito Melema, at your service."

Komola's astonishment could hardly have been greater
if the stranger had worn a panther-skin and carried a
thyrsus; for the cunning barber had said nothing of the
CI reek's age or appearance; and among her father's scholarly
visitors, she had hardly ever seen any but middle-aged or
gray-haired men. There was only one masculine face, at
once youthful and beautiful, the image of which remained
deeply impressed on her mind: it was that of her brother,
who long years ago had taken her on his knee, kissed hci-,
and never come back again: a fair face, with sunny hair,
like her own. But the habitual attitude of her mind
toward strangers — a proud self-dependence and deter-
uiination to ask for nothing even by a smile — confirmed
in her by her father's complaints "^ against the world's
injustice, was like a snowy embankment hemming in the
rush of admiring surprise. Tito's bright face showed its
rich-tinted beauty without any rivalry of color above his
black sajo or tunic reaching to the knees. It seemed like
a wreatfi of spring, dropped suddenly in Eomola's young
but wintry life, which had inherited nothing but memo-
ries— memories of a dead mother, of a lost brother, of a
blind father's happier time — memories of far-off light,
love, and beauty, that lay embedded in dark mines of
books, and could hardly give out their brightness again
until they were kindled for her by the torch of some
known Joy. Nevertheless, she returned Tito's bow, made
to her on entering, Avith the same pale proud face as ever;
but, as lie approached; the snoAv melted; uud when h(,'

00 ROMOLA..

ventured to look toward her again, while Xello was speak-
ing, a pink flush overspread her face, to vanish again
almost immediately, as if her imperious will had recalled
it. Tito's glance, on the contrary, had that gentle, beseech-
ing admiration in it which is the most propitiating of
appeals to a proud, shy woman, and is jierhaps the only
atonement a man can make for being too handsome. The
finished fascination of his air came chiefly from the absence
of demand and assumption. It was that of a fleet, soft-
coated, dark-eyed animal that delights you by not bound-
ing away in indifference from 3^ou, and unexpectedly pilloAvs
its chin on your palm, and looks up at you desiring to be
stroked — as if it loved you.

" Messere, I give you Avelcome," said Bardo, with some
condescension; "misfortune wedded to learning, and espe-
cially to Greek learning, is a letter of credit that should win
the ear of every instructed Florentine; for, as you are
doubtless aAvare, since the period when your countryman,
Manuelo Crisolora, diffused the light of his teaching in
the chief cities of Italy, now nearly a century ago, no
man is held worthy of the name of scholar who has
acquired merely the transplanted and derivative literature
of the Latins; rather, such inert students are stigmatized
as ojnci or barbarians according to the johrase of the
Romans themselves, who frankly rei»lenished their urns at
the fountain-head. I am, as you perceive, and as Nello
has doubtless forewarned you, totally blind: a calamity to
Avhich we Florentines are held especially liable, whether
owing to the cold winds which rush upon us in sj^ring
from the passes of the Apennines, or to that sudden trans-
ition from the cool gloom of our houses to the dazzling
brightness of our summer sun, by which the lippi are said
to have been made so numerous among the ancient
Romans; or, in fine, to some occult cause which eludes
our superficial surmises. But I i)ray you be seated: Xello,
my friend, be seated."

Bardo paused until his fine ear had assured him that the
visitors were seating themselves, and that Romola was
taking her usual chair at his right hand. Then he said—

'•'From what part of Greece do you come, Mersere? I
had thought that your unhappy country had been almost
exhausted of those sons who could cherish in their minds
any image of her original glory, though indeed the barbar-
ous Sultans have of late shown themselves nut indisposed
to engraft on their wild stock the precious vine which

DAAVXIXG HOPES. 61

their own fierce bands have hewn down and trampled
under foot. From what part of Greece do you come?"

''I sailed last from Xauplia," said Tito; "but I have
resided both at Constantinople and Thessalonica, and have
traveled in various parts little visited by Western Chris-
tians since the triumph of tlie Turkish arms. I should
tell you, however, Messere, that I was not born in Greece,
but at Bari. I spent the first sixteen years of my life in
Southern Italy and Sicily."

While Tito was speaking, some emotion passed, like a
breath on the waters, across Bardo's delicate features; he
leaned forward, put out his right hand toward Eomola,
and turned his head as if about to speak to her; but then,
correcting himself, turned away again, and said, in a sub-
dued voice —

"Excuse me; is it not true — you are young?"

" I am three-and-twenty," said Tito.

"Ah," said Bardo, still in a tone of subdued excite-
ment, "and you had, doubtless, a father who cared for
your early instruction — who, perhaps, was himself a
scholar?"

There was a slight pause before Tito's answer came to
the ear of Bardo: but for Romola and Xello it began
with a slight shock that seemed to pass through him, and
cause a momentary quivering of the lip; doubtless at the
revival of a supremely painful remembrance.

" Yes," he replied, "at least a father by adoption. He
was a Neapolitan, and of accomplished scholarship, both
Latin and Greek. But," added Tito, after another slight
pause, " he is lost to me — was lost on a voyage he too
rashly undertook to Delos."

Bardo sank back again, too delicate to ask another
question that might probe a sorrow which he divined to be
recent. Romola, wdio knew well what were the fibres tiiat
Tito's voice had stirred in her father, felt that this new
acquaintance had with wonderful suddenness got within the
barrier that lay between them and the alien world. Xello,
thinking that the evident check given to the conversation
offered a graceful opportunity for relieving himself from
silence, said —

" In truth, it is as clear as Venetian glass that this fine
young man has had the best of training; for the two
Cennini have set him to w'ork at their Greek sheet already,
and it seems to me they are not men to begin cutting
before they have felt the edge of their tools; they tested

62 ROMOLA.

him well beforehand, we may be sure, and if there are t^vo
things not to be hidden — love and a cough — I say there is a
third, and that is ignorance, when once a man is obliged
to do something besides wagging his head. The tonsor
inequalis is inevitably betrayed when he takes the shears
in his hand; is it not true, Messer Bardo? I speak after
the fashion of a barber, but, as Luigi Pulci says —

' Perdonimi s'io fallo: chi m'ascolta
Inteada il mio volgar col suo latino.' "

" Nay, my good Nello," said Bardo, with an air of
friendly severity, " you are not altogether illiterate, and
might doubtless have made a more respectable progress in
learning if you had abstained somewhat from the c'icalata
and gossip of the street corner, to which our Florentines
are excessively addicted; but still more if you had not
clogged your memory with those frivolous productions of
which Luigi Pulci has furnished the most peccant exemp-
lar— a compendium of extravagances and incongruities the
farthest removed from the models of a pure age, and
resembling rather the grylli or conceits of a period when
mystic meaning was held a warrant for monstrosity of
form; with this difference, that while the monstrosity is
retained, the mystic meaning is absent; in contemptible
contrast with the great poem of Virgil, who, as I long held
with Filelfo, before Landino had taken upon liim to
expound the same opinion, embodied the deepest lessons
of philosophy in a graceful and well-knit fable. And I
cannot but regard the multiplication of these babbling,
lawless productions, albeit countenanced by the patronage,
and in some degree the example, of Dorenzo himself,
otherwise a friend to true learning, as a sign that the
glorious hopes of this century are to be quenched in
gloom; nay, that they have been the delusive prologue to
an age worse than that of iron — the age of tinsel and
gossamer, in which no thought has substance enough to be
moulded into consistent and lasting form."

"Once more, pardon," said Nello, opening his palms
outward, and shrugging his shoulders, " I find myself
knowing so many things in good Tuscan before I have
time to think of the Latin for them; and Messer Luigi's
rhymes are always slipping off the lips of my customers: —
that is what corrupts me. And, indeed, talking of cus-
tomers, I have left my shop and my reputation too long in
the custody of my slow Sandro, who does not deserve even

DAWNIN"G HOPES. 63

to be called a fonsor inequalis, but rather to be pro-
nounced simply a bungler iu the vulgar tongue. So with
your permission Messer Bardo, I will take mv leave— well
understood that I am at your service whenever Maso calls
upon me. It seems a thousand years till I dress and per-
tume the damigella's hair, which deserves to shine in the
heavens as a constellation, though indeed it were a pitv for
it ever to go so far out of reach."

Three voices made a fugue of friendly farewells to
^ello, as he retreated with a bow to Eomola and a beck to
lito. ihe acute barber saw that the pretty youngster
who had crept into his liking by some strong magic, was
well launched m Bardo's favorable regard; and satisfied
that his introduction had not miscarried so far, he felt the
propriety of retiring.

The little burst of wrath, called forth by Nello's
unlucky quotation, had diverted Bardo's mind from the
feelings which had just before been hemming in further
speech, and he now addressed Tito again with his ordinary
calmness, "^

'/Ah young man, you are happy in having been able to
unite the advantages of travel with those of study, and
you will be welcome among us as a bringer of fresh tidings
from a land which has become sadly strange to us. except
through the agents of a now restricted commerce and the
reports of hasty pilgrims. For those days are in the far
distance which I myself witnessed, when men like Aurispa
and Guanno went out to Greece as to a storehouse, and
came back laden with manuscripts which every scholar
was eager to borrow— and, be it owned with shame, not
always willing to restore; nay, even the days when erudite
Greeks flocked to our shores for a refuge, seem far off
now— tarther off than the on-coming of my blindness.
But doubtless, young man, research after the treasures
ot antiquity was not alien to the purpose of your travels'"
^\ssuredly not," said Tito. "On the contrary, my
companion-my father-was willing to risk his life in his
zeal tor the discovery of inscriptions and other traces of
ancient civilization.

"And I trust thei-e is a record of his researches and
their results," said Bardo, eagerly, -since they must be
even more precious than those of Ciriaco, which I have
diligently availed myself of, though they are not always
Illuminated by adequate learning."

"There was such a record," said Tito, "but it was lost.

64 ROMOLA.

like everything else, in the shipwreck 1 suffered below
Ancona. The only record left is such as remains in our —
in my memory."

" You must lose no time in committing it to paper,
young man," said Bardo, with growing interest. " Doubt-
less you remember much, if you aided in transcri})tion;
for Avhen I was your age, words Avrought themselves into
my mind as if they had been fixed by the tool of the graver:
wherefore I constantly marvel at the capriciousness of my
daughter's memory, which grasps certain objects with
tenacity, and lets fall all those minutiaB whereon dejjends
accuracy, the very soul of scholarship. But I ajjjn-ehend
no such danger with you, young man, if your will has
seconded the advantages of your training."

When Bardo made this reference to his daughter, Tito
ventured to turn his eyes toward her, and at the accusation
against her memory his face broke into its brightest smile,
which was reflected as inevitably as sudden sunbeams in
Eomola's. Conceive the soothing delight of that smile to
her! Eomola had never dreamed that there was a scholar
in the world who would smile at the deficiency for which
she was constantly made to feel herself a culprit. It was
like the dawn of a new sense to her — the sense of comrade-
ship. They did not look away from each other immedi-
ately, as if the smile had been a stolen One; they looked and
smiled with frank enjoyment.

" She is not really so cold and proud," thought Tito.

" Does he forget too, I wonder? " thought Romola. " Yet
I hope not, else he will vex my father."

But Tito was obliged to turn away, and answer Bardo's
question.

" I have had much practice in transcription," he said;
'* but in the case of inscriptions copied in memorable
scenes, rendered doubly impressive by tlie sense of risk and
adventure, it may have happened that my retention of
written characters has been weakened. On the plain of
Eurotas, or among the gigantic stones of Mycenae and
Tyrins — especially when the fear of the Turk hovers over
one like a vulture — the mind wanders, even though the
hand writes faithfully what the eye dictates. But some-
thing doubtless I have retained," added Tito- with a mod-
esty which was not false, though he was conscious that it
was not politic, " something that might be of service if
illustrated and corrected by a wider learning than myoAvn."

" That is well spoken, young man," said Bardo, delighted.

DAWNING HOPES. G5

"And I will not withhold from you such aid as I can give,
if you like to communicate with me concerning your rec-
ollections. I foresee a work which will be a useful sup-
plement to the ' Isolario ' of Christoforo Buondelmonte,
and which may take rank with the ' Itineraria ' of Ciriaco
and the admirable Ambrogio Traversari. But Ave must
prepare ourselves for calumny, young man," Bardo v\'ent
on with energy, as if the work were already growing so fast
that the time of trial was near; ''if your book contains
novelties you will be charged with forgery; if my elucida-
tions should clash with any principles of interpretation
adojoted by another scholar, our personal characters will be
attacked, we shall be impeached with foul actions; you
must prepare yourself to be told that your mouther was a
fish-woman, and that your father was a renegade priest or
a hanged malefactor. I myself, for having shown error in
a single preposition, had an invective written against me
Avherein I was charged with treachery, fraud, indecency,
and even hideous crimes. Such, my young friend — such
are the flowers with which the glorious path of scholarship
is strewed! But tell me, then: I have learned much con-
cerning Byzantium and Tliessalonica long ago from Deme-
trio Calcondila, who has but lately departed from Florence;
but you, it seems, have visited less familiar scenes?"

"Yes; we made what I may call a pilgrimage full of
danger, for the sake of visiting places which have almost
died out of the memory of the West, for they lie away from
the track of pilgrims; and my father used to say that
scholars themselves hardly imagine them to have any exist-
ence out of books. He was of opinion that a new and more
glorious era would open for learning when men should
begin to look for their commentaries on the ancient writers
in the remains of cities and temples, n^y, in the paths of
the rivers, and on the face of the valleys and the moun-
tains."

"Ah!" said Bardo, fervidty, "your father, then, was
not a common man. AVas he fortunate, may I ask? Had
he many friends?" These last words were uttered in a
tone charged with meaning.

"No; he made enemies — chiefly, I believe, by a certain
impetuous candor; and they hindered his advancement, so
that he lived in obscurity. And he would never stoop to
conciliate: he could never forget an injury."

"Ah!" said Bardo again, with a long, deep intonation.

"Among our hazardous expeditions," continued Tito,
5

G6 ROMOLA.

willing to prevent further questions on a point so personal,
"I remember with particular vividness a hastih^ snatched
visit to Athens. Our hurry, and the double danger of
being seized as prisoners by the Turks, and of our galley
raising anchor before we could return, made it seem like a
fevered vision of the night — the wide plain, the girdling
mountains, the ruined porticoes and columns, either stand-
ing far aloof, as if receding from our hurried footsteps, or
else jammed in confusedly among the dwellings of Chris-
tians degraded into servitude, or among the forts and
turrets of their Moslem conquerers, who have their strong-
hold on the Acropolis."

"You fill me with surprise," said Bardo. ''Athens,
then, is not utterly destroyed and swept away, as I had
imagined?"

'- No wonder you should be under that mistake, for few
even of the Greeks themselves, who live beyond the moun-
tain boundary of Attica, know anything about the ^^resent
condition of Athens, or Setine, as the sailors call it. I
remember, as we were rounding the promontory of Sunium,
the Greek pilot we had on board our Venetian galley pointed
to the mighty columns that stand on the summit of the
rock — the remains, as you know well, of the great temple
erected to the goddess Athena, who looked down from
that high shrine with triumph at her conquered rival
Poseidon; — well, our Greek pilot, pointing to those col-
umns, said, ' That was the school of the great philosopher
Aristotle.' And at Athens itself, the monk who acted as
our guide in the hasty view we snatched, insisted most on
showing us the spot where St. Philip baptized the Ethio-
pian eunuch, or some such legend."

"Talk not of monks and their legends, young man!"
said Bardo, interrupting Tito impetuously. "It is enough
to overlay human hope and enterprise with an eternal
frost to think that the ground which was trodden by phi-
losophers and poets is crawled over by those insect-swarms
of besotted fanatics or howling hypocrites."

" Perdio, I have no affection for them," said Tito, with
a shrug; " servitude agrees well with a religion like theirs,
which lies in the renunciation of all that makes life
precious to other men. And they carry the yoke that befits
them; their matin chant is drowned by the voice of the
muezzin, who, from the gallery of the high tower on the
Acropolis, calls every Mussulman to his prayers. That
tower springs from the Parthenon itself; and every time

DAAVXIXG HOPES. 67

we paused and directed our eyes toward it, our guide set
up a wail, that a temple which had once been won from
the diabolical uses of the pagans to become the temple of
another virgin than Pallas— the Virgin-Mother of God-
was now again perverted to the accursed ends of the Mos-
lem. It was the sight of those walls of the Acropolis,
which disclosed themselves in the distance as we leaned
over the side of our galley when it was forced bv contrarv
winds to anchor m the Piraeus, that fired my father's mind
Avith the determination to see Athens at all risks, and in
si)ite of the sailors' warnings that if we lingered till a
change of wind, they would depart without us: but. after
all, it was impossible for us to venture near the Acropolis,
for the sight of men eager in examining ' old stones ' raised
the suspicion that we were Venetian spies, and we had to
hurry back to the harbor."

'' We will talk more of these things/' said Bardo, eagerly.
" You must recall everything, to the minutest trace left in
vour memory. You will win the gratitude of after-times
by leaving a record of the aspect Greece bore while yet the
barbarians had not swept away'every trace of the structures
that Pausanias and Pliny described: vou will take those
great writers as your models; and such contribution of
criticism and suggestion as my riper mind can supplv shall
not he wanting to you. There will be much to tell; for
you have traveled, you said, in the Peloponnesus?"

"Yes; and in Boeotiaalso: I have rested in the groves of
Helicon, and tasted of the fountain Hippocrene. But on
every memorable spot in Greece conquest after conquest
has set its seal, till there is a confusion of ownership even
in rums, that only close study and comparison could un-
ravel. High over every fastness, from the plains of Lace-
dajmon to the straits of Thermopylee, there towers some
huge trankish fortress, once inhabited by a French or
Italian marquis, now either. abandoned or held by Turkish
bands,"

"Stay!" cried Bardo, whose mind was now too thor-
oughly preoccupied by the idea of the future book to
attend to Tito's further narration. "Do you think of
writing m Latin or Greek? Doubtless Greek is the more
ready clothing for your thoughts, and it is the nobler lan-
guage. But, on the other hand, Latin is the tongue in
which we shall measure ourselves with the larger and more ■
lamous number of modern rivals. And if you are less at
ease m it, I will aid you— yes, I will spend on vou^hat lono--

68 KOMOLA.

accunmlated study which was to have been thrown into the
channel of another work — a work in which I mj^self was
to have had a helpmate."

Bardo paused a moment, and then added —

''But who knows whether that work may not be executed
yet? For you, too, young man, have been brought up by
a father who poured into your mind all the long-gathered
stream of his knowledge and experience. Our aid might
be mutual."

Eomola, who had watched her father's growing excite-
ment, and divined well the invisible currents of feeling
that determined every question and remark, felt herself in
a glow of strange anxiety: she turned her eyes on Tito
continually, to watch the impression her father's words
made on him, afraid lest he should be inclined to dispel
these visions of co-operation Avhich were lighting up her
father's face with a new hope. But no! He looked so
bright and gentle: he must feel, as she did, that in this
eagerness of blind age there was piteousness enough to call
forth inexhaustible patience. How much more strongly
he would feel this if he knew about her brother! A girl
of eighteen imagines the feelings behind the face that has
moved her with its sympathetic youth, as easily as primi-
tive people imagined the humors of the gods in fair
weather: what is she to believe in, if not in this vision
woven from Avithin?

And Tito was really very far from feeling impatient.
He delighted in sitting there with the sense that Eomola's
attention was fixed on him, and that he could occasionally
look at her. He was pleased that Bardo should take an
interest in him: and he did not dwell with enough serious-
ness on the prospect of the work in which he was to be
aided, to feel moved by it to anything else than that easy,
good-humored acquiescence which was natural to him.

"I shall be proud and happy," he said, in answer to
Bardo's last words, "if my services can be held a meet
offering to the matured scholarship of Messere. But doubt-
less"— here he looked toward Romola — "the lovely dami-
gella, your daughter, makes all other aid superfluous: for
I have learned from Nello that she has been nourished on
the highest studies from her earliest years."

"You are mistaken," said Eomola; "I am by no means
sufficient to my father: I have not the gifts that are neces-
sary for scholarship."

dawxixCt hopes. 69

Roinola did not make this self -dej)recirttory statement in
a tone of anxions humility, but with a iDroud gravity.

"Xay, my Romola," said her fatlier, not willing that
the stranger should have too low a conception of his
daughter's powers; " thou art not destitute of gifts;
rather, thou art endowed beyond the measure of women;
but thou hast withal the woman's delicate frame, which
ever craves repose and variety, and so begets a Avandering
imagination. My daughter" — turning to Tito — "has
been very precious to me, filling up to the best of her
]>ower the place of a son. For I had once a son "

Bardo checked himself: he did not wish to assume an
attitude of complaint in the presence of a stranger, and he
remembered that this young man, in whom he had unex-
})ectedly become so much interested, was still a stranger,
toward whom it became him rather to keep the position of
a patron. His pride was roused to double activity by the
fear that he had forgotten his dignity.

"But," he resumed, in his original tone of condescen-
sion, "we are departing from what I believe is to you the
most important business. Xello informed me that you
had certain gems which you would fain dispose of, and
that you desired a passport to some man of wealth and
taste who would be likely to become a purchaser."

" It is true; for, though I have obtained employment,
as a corrector with the Oennini, my payment leaves little
margin beyond the provision of necessaries, and would
leave less but that my good friend Nello insists on my
hiring a lodging from him, and saying nothing about the
rent till better days."

"Xello is a good- hearted prodigal," said Bardo; "and
though, with that ready ear and ready tongue of his, he is
too much like the ill-famed Margites — knowing many
things and knowing them all badly, as I hinted to him
but now — he is nevertheless 'abnormis sapiens,' after the
manner of our born Florentines. But have you the gems
with you? I would willingly know what they are — yet it
is useless: no, it might only deepen regret. I cannot add
to my store."

" 1 have one or two intaglios of much beauty," said
Tito, proceeding to draw from his wallet a small case.

But Romola no sooner saw the movement than she
looked at him with significant gravity, and placed her
finger on her lips,

" Con viso che tacenclo dicea, Taci.

70 KOMOLA.

If Bardo were made aware that the gems were within
reach, sl]e knew well he wonld want a minute description
of them, and it would become pain to him that they should
go away from him, even if he did not insist on some device
for purchasing them m spite of poverty. But she had no
sooner made this sign than she felt rather guilty and
ashamed at having virtually confessed a weakness of her
father's to a stranger. It seemed that she was destined
to a sudden confidence and familiarity with this young
Greek, strangely at variance with her deep-seated pride
and reserve; and this consciousness again brought the
unwonted color to her cheeks,

Tito understood her look and sign, and immediately
withdrew his hand from the case, saying, in a careless tone,
so as to make it appear that he was merely following up his
last words, " But they are usually in the kee})ing of Messer
Domenico Cennini, who has strong and safe places for
these things. He estimates tliem as worth at least five
hundred ducats."

"Ah, then, they are fine intagli," said Bardo. "Five
hundred ducats! Ah, more than a man's ransom I"

Tito gave a slight, almost inijoerceptible start, and
opened his long dark e3^es with questioning surprise at
Bardo's blind face, as if his words — a mere phrase of com-
mon parlance, at a time when men were often being ran-
somed from slavery or imj^risonment — had had some special
meaning for him. But the next moment he looked
toward Eomola, as if her eyes must be her father's inter-
preters. She, intensely preoccupied with what related to
her father, imagined that Tito Avas looking to her again
for some guidance, and immediately spoke.

"Alessandra Scala delights in gems, you knoAv, father;
she calls them her winter flowers; and the Segretario would
be almost sure to buy any gems that she wished for.
Besides, he himself sets great store by rings and sigils,
which he wears as a defense against pains in the joints."

" It is true," said Bardo. " Bartolommeo has overmuch
confidence in the efficacy of gems — a confidence wider than
what is sanctioned by Pliny, who clearly shows that he
regards many beliefs of that sort as idle superstitions;
though not to the utter denial of medicinal virtues in
gems. Wherefore, I myself, as you observe, young man,
wear certain rings, which the discreet Camillo Leonardi
prescribed to me by letter when two years ago I had a cer-
tain infirmity of sudden numbness. But thou hast spoken

BAWJSMKG HOPES. 71

well Romola I will dictate a letter to Bartolommeo,
wliich Maso shall carry. But it were well that Messere
slioulcl notity to thee what the gems are, together with the
intagli they bear, as a warrant to Bartolommeo that thev
will be worthy of his attention."

"Nay father," said Romola, whose dread lest a par-
oxysm o± the collector's mania should seize her father, gave
her the courage to resist his proposal. " Your word will
be sufficient that Messere is a scholar and has traveled
much. Ihe Segretario will need no further inducement
to receive him."

"True, child," said Bardo, touched on a chord that was
sure to res}3ond. " I have no need to add proofs and
arguments in coniirmation of my word to Bartolommeo.
And i doubt not that this young man's presence is in
accord with the tones of his voice, so that, the door beiuo-
once opened, he will be his own best advocate." *

Bardo paused a few moments, but his silence was evi-
dently charged with some idea that he was hesitating to
express, for he once leaned forward a little as if he were
going to speak, then turned his head aside toward Romola
and sank backward again. At last, as if he had made up his
mmd, Jie said m a tone which might have become a prince
giving the courteous signal of dismissal—

'[ I am somewhat fatigued this morning, and shall prefer
seeing you again to-morrow, when I shall be able to give
you the secretary's answer, authorizing vou to present
yourself to him at some given time. But before you go "—
here the old man, in spite of himself, fell into a more
taitermg tone— "you will perhaps permit me to touch
your hand? It is long since I touched the hand of a
young man.

Bardo had stretched out his aged white hand, and Tito
immediately placed his dark but delicate and supple fino-ers
within It Bardo's cramped fingers closed over them, and
lie^beld them for a few minutes in silence. Then he said—

" Komola, has this young man the same complexion as
thy brother— fair and pale? "

" No, father," Romola answered, with determined com-
posure, though her heart began to beat violently with
mmged emotions. ''The hair of Messere is da/k— his
?°^^P^f;^lon is dark." Inwardly she said, "Will he mind
It. will It be disagreeable? No, he looks so gentle and
good-natured." Then aloud ao-ain—

7'3 ROMOLA.

\Vould Messere permit my father to toucli his hair and
face?"

Her eyes inevitably made a timid entreating appeal
while she asked this, and Tito's met them with soft bright-
ness as he said, *' Assuredly," and, leaning forward, raised
Bardo's hand to his curls, with a readiness of assent, which
was the greater relief to her, because it was unaccompanied
by any sign of embarrassment.

Bardo passed his hand again and again over the long
curls and grasped them a little, as if their spiral resistance
made his inward vision clearer; then he passed his hand
over the brow and cheek, tracing the profile with the edge
of his palm and fourth finger, and letting the breadth of
liis hand rejDOse on the rich oval of the cheek.

''Ah," he said, as his hand glided from the face and
rested on the young man's shoulder, "' he must be very
unlike thy brother, Romola: and it is the better. You
see no visions, I trust, my young friend?"

At this moment the door opened, and there entered,
unannounced, a tall elderly man in a handsome black silk
lucco, who, unwinding his becchetto from his neck and
taking off his cap, disclosed a head as white as Bardo's.
He cast a keen glance of surprise at the group before him —
the young stranger leaning in that filial attitude, while
Bardo's hand rested on his shoulder, and Romola sitting
near with eyes dilated by anxiety and agitation. But
there was an instantaneous change; Bardo let fall liis
hand, Tito raised himself from his stooping posture, and
Romola rose to meet the visitor with an alacrity whicli
implied all the greater intimacy, because it was unaccom-
panied by any smile.

"Well, god-daughter," said the stately man, as he
touched Romola's shoulder; ''Maso said you had a visitor,
but I came in nevertheless."

''It is thou, Bernardo," said Bardo. "Thou art come
at a fortunate moment. This young man," he continued,
while Tito rose and bowed, " is one of j the chief citizens
of Florence, Messer Barnardo del Nero, my oldest, I had
almost said my only friend — whose good opinion, if you
can win it, may carry you far. He is but three-and-
twenty, Bernardo, yet he can doubtless tell thee much
which thou wilt care to hear; for though a scholar, he has
already traveled far, and looked on other things besides
the manuscripts for which thou hast too light an esteem."

"Ah, a Greek, as I augur," said Bernardo, returning

DAWXING HOPES. 73

Tito's reverence but slightly, and surveying him with that
sort of glance which seems almost to cut like fine steel
''^ewly arrived in Florence, it appears. The name of
Messere — or part of it, for it is doubtless a long one?"
^^ "On the contrary/' said Tito, with perfect good-humor,
"it is most modestly free from polvsyllabic pomp. Mv
name is Tito Melema." r . j i ^ j

"Truly?" said Bernardo, rather scornfully, as he took
a seat; "I had expected it to be at least as long as the
names of a city, a river, a province, and an empire all put
together. We Florentines mostly use names as we do
prawns, and strip them of all flourishes before we trust
them to our throats,"

"Well, Bardo," he continued, as if the stranger were
not worth further notice, and changing his tone of sar-
castic suspicion for one of sadness, "we have buried him."
^^ "Ah!" replied Bardo, with corresponding sadness,
"and a new epoch has come for Florence — a dark one, I
fear. Lorenzo has left behind him an inheritance that' is
but like the alchemist's laboratory when the wisdom of
the alchemist is gone."

" Not altogether so," said Bernardo. "Piero de Medici
has abundant intelligence; his faults are only the faults of
hot blood. I love the lad — lad he will always be to me,
as I have always been 'little father' to him."

"Yet all who want a new order of things are likelv to
conceive new hopes,* said Bardo. "We shall have "'the
old strife of parties. I fear."

"If we could have a new order of things that was
something else than knocking down one coat of arms to
put up another," said Bernardo, "I should be ready to
say, 'I belong to no party: I am a Florentine.' But as
long as parties are in question, I am a Medicean, and will
be a Medicean till I die. I am of the same mind as
iarmata degli Uberti: if any man asks me Avhat is meant
by sidmg with a party, I say, as he did, ' To wish ill or
well, for the sake of past M^-ongs or kindnesses.' "

Buring this short dialogue, Tito had been standing,
and now took his leave.

"But come again at the same hour to-morrow," said
Bardo, graciously, before Tito left the room, "that I may
give you Bartolommeo's answer."

"From what quarter of the sky has this prettv Greek
youngster alighted so close to thy chair, Bardo"?" said
iiernardo del Nero, as the door closed. He spoke with

74 KOMOLA.

dry emphasis, evidently intended to convey something
more to Bardo than was imj)lied by the mere words.

''He is a scholar who has been shi2:)wrecked and has
saved a few gems, for which he wants to find a purchaser.
I am going to send him to Bartolommeo Scala, for thou
knowest it were more prudent in me to abstain from
further purchases."

Bernardo shrugged his shoulders and said, " Romola,
wilt thou see if my servant is without? I ordered him to
wait for me here." Tlien, when Romola was at a sufficient
distance, he leaned forward and said to Bardo in a low,
emphatic tone —

" Remember, Bardo, thou hast a rare gem of thy own;
take care no one gets it who is not likely to pay a worthy
price. That pretty Greek has a lithe sleekness about him
that seems marvelously fitted for slipping easily into any
nest he fixes his mind on."

Bardo was startled: the association of Tito with the
image of his lost son had excluded instead of suggesting
the thought of Romola. But almost immediately there
seemed to be a reaction which made him grasp the warning
as if it had been a hope.

"■ But why not, Bernardo? If the 3'oung man approved
himself worthy — he is a scholar — and — and there M'ould
be no difficulty about the dowry, which always makes thee
gloomy."

CHAPTER VII.

A LEAENED SQUABBLE.

. Bartolommeo Scala, secretary of the Florentine Re-
public, on whom Tito Melemahad been thus led to anchor
his hopes, lived in a handsome palace close to the Porta
Pinti, now known as the Casa (Iherardesca. His arms —
an azure ladder transverse on a golden field, with the motto
(Trudatini placed over the entrance — told all comers that
the miller's son held his ascent to honors by his own efforts.
a fact to be proclaimed without Avincing. The secretary
was a vain and pompous man, but he was also an honest
one: he was sincerely convinced of his own merit, and
could see no reason for feigning. The topmost round of
his azure ladder had been reached by this time: he had

A LEARKED SQUABBLE. 75

held his secretaryship these twenty years— had loiiff since
made his orations on the ringhiera/or platform of tlie Old
raiace, as the custom was, in the presence of imncely
visitors, while Marzocco, the republican lion, wore his gold
crown on the occasion, and all the people cried, '' Viva
.Messer Bartolommeo."'— had been on an embassy to Rome,
and had thei-e been made titular Senator, Apostolical Sec-
retary Knight of the Golden Spur; and had, eight years
ago, been Gonfaloniere — last goal of the Florentine
citizens ambition. Meantime he had got richer and
richer, and more and more gouty, after the manner of
successful mortality; and the Knight of the Golden Spur
had often to sit with helpless cushioned heel under the
handsome loggia he had built for himself, overlooking the
spacious gardens and lawn at the back of his palace

He was m this position on the day when he had granted
the desired interview to Tito Melema. The May after-
noon sun was on the flowers and the grass beyond the
pleasan shade of the loggia; the too stately silk lucco was
cast aside, and the light loose mantle was thrown over his
tunic; his beautiful daughter Alessandra and her husband,
the Greek soldier-poet Marullo, were seated on one side of
.iT\?'' f other,' two friends not oppressively illustrious,
and therefore the better listeners. Yet, to say nothing of
the gout, Messer Bartolommeo's felicity was far from
perfect: It was embittered by the contents of certain
papers that lay before him, consisting chiefly of a corre-
spondence between himself and Politian. It was a human
toible at that period (incredible as it mav seem) to recite
quarrels, and favor scholarly visitors with the communica-
tion of an entire and lengthy correspondence; and this was
neither the first nor the second time that Scala had asked
the candid opin„m-of his friends as to the balance of
S.1? 7 p¥ ■'' '""T l^^^f-score Latin letters between
himself and Pohtian, all springing out of certain epigrams
written m the most playful tone in the world. It wis tlie

tfl f 5 ''?'^^ ^^^''"^^^ ^''^ P^'^^^y quarrel, in which we are
mteiested, because it supplied precisely that thistle of
.h:rj!^^''^''''''^I according to Nello. as k stimulus to the
sluggish paces of the cautious steed. Friendship

.nrl t]!'T' \^^f% ^T}' ^ ^'^^^cteA pretender to the love
Wni^i i ?f °^ ^'^^^ ' daughter, kept a very sharp and
leamed tooth m readiness against the too prosperous and
presumptuous secretary, who had declined the greatest
scholar of the age for a son-in-law. Scala was I meri-

76 ROMOLA.

torious public servant, and, moreover, a lucky man —
naturally exasperating to an offended scholar; but then —
0 beautiful balance of things! — he had an itch for author-
ship, and was a bad writer — one of those excellent people
who, sitting in gouty slii)pers, "penned poetical trifles"
entirely for their own amusement, without any view to an
audience, and, consequently, sent them to their friends in
letters, which were the literary periodicals of the fifteentli
century. Now Scala had abundance of friends who were
ready to praise his writings: friends like Ficino and Lan-
dino — amiable browsers in the Medicean park along with
himself — who found his Latin prose style elegant and mas-
culine ; and the terrible Joseph Scaliger, who was to
pronounce him totally ignorant of Latinity, was at a com-
fortable distance in the next century. But when was the
fatal coquetry inherent in superfluous authorship ever
quite contented with the ready praise of friends? That
critical supercilious Politian — a fellow-broAvser, who was
far from amiable — must be made aware that the solid sec-
retary showed, in his leisure hours, a pleasant fertility in
verses, which indicated pretty clearly how much he might
do in that way if he were not a man of affairs.

Ineffable moment! when the man you secretly hate
sends you a Latin epigram with a false gender — hendeca-
syllables with a questionable elision, at least a toe too
much — attempts at poetic figures which are manifest
solecisms. That moment had come to Politian: the secre-
tary had put forth his soft head from the official shell, and
the terrible lurking crab was down upon him. Politian had
used the freedom of a friend, and pleasantly, in the form of
a Latin ei)igram corrected the mistake of Scala in making
the culex (an insect too Avell known on the banks of
the Arno) of the inferior or feminine gender. Scala re-
plied by a bad joke, in suitable Latin verses, referring to
Politian's unsuccessful suit. Better and better. Politian
found tlie verses very pretty and highly facetious: the
more was the pity that they were seriously incorrect, and
inasmuch as Scala had alleged that he had written them in
imitation of a Greek epigram, Politian, being on such
friendly terms, Avould enclose a Greek epigram of his own,
on the same interesting insect — not, we may presume, out
of any wish to humble Scala, but rather to instruct him ;
said epigram containing a lively conceit about Venus, _
Cupid, and the culex, of a kind much tasted at that
period, founded partly on the zoological fact that the

BALDASSAKHK MAKES AK AC(iUAINTANCE. 77

looking like a truncated tower roofed in with fluted tiles,
and close by was a small outhouse, apparently built up
against a piece of ruined stone wall. Under a large half-
dead mulberry-tree that was now sending its last fluttering
leaves in at the open doorways, a shriveled, hardy old
woman was untying a goat with two kids, and Baldassarre
could see that part of the outbuilding was occupied by live
stock; but the door of the other part was open, and it was
empty of everything but some tools and straw. It was just
the sort of place he wanted. He spoke to the old woman;
but it was not till he got close to her and shouted in her ear,
that he succeeded in making her understand his want of a
lodging, and his readiness to pay for it. At first he could get
no answer beyond shakes of the head and the words, '' No —
no lodging," uttered in the muffled tone of the deaf. But,
by dint of persistence, he made clear to her that he was a
poor stranger from a long way over seas, and could not
atford to go to hostelries; that he only wanted to lie on
the straw in the outhouse, and would pay her a quattrino
or two a week for that shelter. She still looked at him
dubiously, shaking her head and talking low to^ herself;
but presently, as if a new thought occurred to her, she
fetched a hatchet from the house, and, showing him a
chump that lay half covered with litter in a corner, asked
him if he would chop that up for her: if he would, he
might lie in the outhouse for one night. He agreed, and
Monna Lisa stood with her arms akimbo to Avatch him,
with a smile of gratified cunning, saying low to herself —

"It's lain there ever since my old man died. What
then? I might as well have put a stone on the fire. He
chojis very well, though he does speak with a foreign
tongue, and looks odd. I couldn^t have got it done
cheaper. And if he only wants a bit of straw to lie on, I
might make him do an errand or two up and down the
hill. Who need know? And sin that's hidden's half
forgiven.* He's a stranger: he'll take no notice of he7\
And I'll tell her to keep her tongue still."

The antecedent to these feminine pronouns had a pair
of blue eyes, which at that moment were applied to a large
round hole in the shutter of the upper window. The shutter
was closed, not for any penal reasons, but because only the
opposite window had the luxury of glass in it; the weather
was not warm, and a round hole four inches in diameter
served all the j)urposes of observation. The hole was,

*"Peccato celato e mezzo perdonato."

78 ROMOLA.

nient on that head — which furnished a Greek quotation to
serve as powder to his bullet.

The quarrel could not end there. The logic could
hardly get worse, but the secretary got more i)ompously
self-asserting, and the scholarly poet's temper more and
more venomous. Politian had been generously willing to
hold up a mirror, by which the too-inflated secretary,
beholding his own likeness, might be induced to cease
setting up his ignorant defenses of bad Latin against
ancient authorities whom the consent of centuries had
placed beyond question, — unless, indeed, he had designed
to sink in literature in proportion as he rose in honors,
that by a sort of compensation men of letters might feel
themselves his equals. In return, Politian was begged to
examine Scala's writings: nowhere would he find a more
devout admiration of antiquity. The secretary was
ashamed of the age in which he lived, and blushed for it.
Some, indeed, there were who wanted to have their own
works praised and exalted to a level with the divine monu-
ments of antiquity; but he, Scala, could not oblige them.
And as to the honors which were offensive to the envious,
they had been well earned: witness his whole life since he
came in penury to Florence. The elegant scholar, in
reply, was not surprised that Scala found the age dis-
tasteful to him, since he himself was so distateful to the
age; nay, it was with perfect accuracy that he, the elegant
scholar, had called Scala a branny monster, inasmuch as
he was formed from the offscourings of monsters, born
amidst the refuse of a mill, and eminently worthy the
long-eared office of turning the paternal millstones {in
pistrini sordihus nahis et qnidem pist7-ino dignissi?mis)l

It was not without reference to Tito's appointed visit
that the papers containing this correspondence were
brought out to-day. Here was a new Greek scholar whose
accomplishments were to be tested, and on nothing did
Scala more desire a dispassionate opinion from persons of
superior knowledge than on that Greek epigram of Poli-
tian's. After sufficient introductory talk concerning
Tito's travels after a survey and discussion of the gems,
and an easy passage from the mention of the lamented
Lorenzo's eagerness in collecting such specimens of
ancient art to the subject of classical tastes and studies
in general and their present condition in Florence,
it was inevitable to mention Politian, a man of emi-
nent ability indeed, but a little too arrogant — assum-

A LEARNED SQUABBLE. 79

ing to be a Hercules, whose oflace it was to destroy
all the literary monstrosities of the age, and writing
letters to his elders without signing them, as if they
were miraculous revelations that could only have one
source. And after all, were not his own criticisms often
questionable and his tastes perverse? He was fond of
saying pungent things about the men who thought they
wrote like Cicero because they ended every sentence with
"esse videtur": but while he was boasting of his freedom
from servile imitation, did he not fall into the other
extreme, running after strange words and affected phrases?
Even in his much belauded 'Miscellanea' was every point
tenable? And Tito, who had just been looking into the
'Miscellanea,' found so much to say that was agreeable to
the secretary — he Avould have done so from the mere dis-
position to please, without further motive — that he showed
himself quite worthy to be made a judge in the notable
correspondence concerning the culex. Here was the Greek
epigram which Politian had doubtless thought the finest
in the world, though he had pretended to believe that the
" transmarini," the Greeks themselves, would make light
of it: had he not been unintentionally speaking the truth
in his false modesty?

Tito was ready, and sacrified the epigram to Scala's
content. 0 wise young judge! He could doubtless appreci-
ate satire even in the vulgar tongue, and Scala — wlio, excel-
lent man, not seeking publicity through the booksellers,
was never unprovided with "hasty uncorrected trifles,"
as a sort of sherbet for a visitor on a hot day, or, if the
weather were cold, why then as a cordial — had a few little
matters in the shape of Sonnets, turning on well-known
foibles of Politians, which he would not like to go any
farther, but whicli would perhaps, amuse the company.

Enough: Tito took his leave under an urgent invitation
to come again. His gems were interesting; especially the
agate, with the lusvs naturm in it — a most won.derful sem-
blance of Cupid riding on the lion; and the "Jew's stone,"
with the lion-headed serpent enchased in it; both of which
the secretary agreed to buy — the latter as a reinforcement
of his preventives against the gout, which gave him such '
severe twinges that it was plain enough how intolerable it
would be if he were not well supplied with rings of rare
virtue, and with an amulet worn close under the right
breast. But Tito was assured that he himself was more
interesting than his gems. He had Avon his way to the

80 KOMOLA.

Scala Palace by the recommendation of Bardo de' Bardi,

who, to be sure, was Scala's old acquaintance and a worthy
scholar, in spite of his overvaluing himself a little (a fre-
quent foible in the secretary's friends); but he must come
again on the ground of his own manifest accomplishments.
The interview could hardly have ended more auspi-
ciously for Tito, and as he walked out at the Porta Piuti
that he might laugh a little at his ease over the affair of
the cnlex, he felt that fortune could hardly mean to turn
her back on him again at ijresent, since she had taken him
by the hand iu this decided way.

CHAPTEK VIII.

FACE I]Sr THE CKOWD.

It is easy to northern people to rise early on Midsummer
morning, to see the dew on the grassy edge of the dusty
pathway, to notice tlie fresh shoots among the darker green
of the oak and fir in the coppice, and to look over the gate
at the shorn meadow, without recollecting that it is the
Nativity of St. John the Baptist.

Not so to the Florentine — still less to the Florentine of
the fifteentli century: to him, on that particular morning,
the brightness of the eastern sun on the Arno had some-
thing special in it; the ringing of the bells was articulate,
and declared it to be the great summer festival of Florence,
the day of San Giovanni.

San Giovanni had been the patron saint of Florence for
at least eiglit hundred years — ever since the time when the
Lombard Queen Theodolinda had commanded her sub-
jects to do him peculiar honor; nay, says old Villani, to
the best of his knowledge, ever since the days of Con«tan-
tine the Great and Pope Sylvester, when the Florentines
deposed their idol Mars, whom they were nevertheless care-
ful not to treat with contumely; for while they consecrated
their beautiful and noble temple to the honor of God and
of the " Beato Messere Santo Giovanni," they placed old
Mars respectfully on a high tower near the River Arno,
finding in certain ancient memorials that he had been
elected as their tutelar deity under such astral influences
that, if he were broken, or otlierwise treated with indig-

A FACE IN THE CEOWD. 81

nity, the city would suffer great damage and mutation.
But, in the fifteenth century, that discreet regard to the
feelings of the Man-destroyer had long vanished: the god
of the spear and shield had ceased to frown by the side of
theArno, and the defenses of the Eepublic were held to
lie in its craft and its coffers. For spear and shield could
be hired by gold florins, and on the gold florins there had
always been the image of San Giovanni.

Much good had come to Florence since the dim time of
struggle between the old patron and the new: some quar-
reling and bloodshed, doubtless, between Guelf and Ghib-
elline, between Black and White, between orthodox sons
of the Church and heretic Paterini; some floods, famine,
and pestilence; but still much wealth and glory. Florence
had achieved conquests over walled cities once mightier
than itself, and especially over hated Pisa, whose marble
buildings were too high and beautiful, whose masts were
too much honored on Greek and Italian coasts. The name
of Florence had been growing prouder and prouder in all
the courts of Europe, nay, in Africa itself, on the strength
of purest gold coinage, finest dyes and textures, pre-emi-
nent scholarship and poetic genius, and wits of the most
serviceable sort for statesmanship and banking: it was a
name so omnipresent that a Pope with a turn for epigram
had called Florentines " the fifth element." And for this
high destiny, though it might partly depend on the stars
and Madonna dell Impruneta, and certainly depended on
other higher powers less often named, the praise was greatly
due to San Giovanni, whose image was on the fair gold
florins.

Therefore it was fltting that the day of San Giovanni —
that ancient Church festival already venerable in the days
of St. Augustine — should be a day of peculiar rejoicing
to Florence, and should be ushered in by a vigil duly kept
m strict old Florentine fashion, with much dancing, with
much _ street jesting, and perhaps with not a little stone-
throwing and window-breaking, but emphatically with
certain street sights such as could only be provided by a
city which held in its service a clever Cecca, engineer and
architect, valuable alike in sieges and in shows. By the
help of Cecca, the very saints, surrounded with their
almond-shaped glory, aiid floating on clouds with their
joyous compa-niouship of winged cherubs, even as they may
be seen to this day in the pictures of Perugino, seemed, on
the eve of San Giovanni, to have brought their piece of
6

82 BOMOLA.

the heavens clown into the narrow streets, and to pass
slowly through them; and, more wonderful still, saints of
gigantic size, with attendant angels, might be seen, not
sea,ted, but moving in a slow, mysterious manner along
the streets, like a procession of colossal figures come down
from the high domes and tribunes of the churches. The
clouds were made of good woven stuff, the saints and
cherubs were unglorified mortals supported by firm bars,
and those mysterious giants were really men of very steady
brain, balancing themselves on stilts, and enlarged, like
Greek tragedians, by huge masks and stuffed shoulders;
but he was a miserably unimaginative Florentine who
thought only of that — nay, somewhat impious, for in the
images of sacred things was there not some of the virtue of
sacred things themselves? And if, after that, there came
a company of merry black demons well armed with claws
and thongs, and other implements of sport, ready to per-
form impromptu farces of bastinadoing and clothes-tearing,
why, that was the demons' way of keeping a vigil, and
they, too, might have descended from the domes and the
tribunes. The Tuscan mind slipped from the devout to
the burlesque, as readily as water round an angle; and the
saints had already had their turn, had gone their way, and
made their due pause before the gates of San Giovanni, to
do him honor on the eve of his fe&ta. And on the morrow,
the great day thus ushered in, it was fitting that the tribu-
tary symbols paid to Florence by all its dependent cities,
districts, and villages, whether conquered, protected, or of
immemorial possession, should be offered at the shrine of
San Giovanni in the old octagonal church, once the cathe-
dral and now the baptistery, where every Florentine had
had the sign of the Cross made with the anointing chrism
on his brow; that all the city, from the white-haired man
to the stripling, and from the matron to the lisping child,
should be clothed in its best to do honor to the great day,
and see the great sight; and that again, when the sun was
sloping and the streets were cool, there should be the
glorious race of Corso, when the unsaddled horses, clothed
in rich trappings, should run right across the city, from
the Porta al Prato on the northwest, through the Mercato
Vccchio, to the Porta Santa Croce on the southeast, where
the richest of Palii, or velvet and brocade banners with
silk linings and fringe of gold, such as became a city that
half clothed the well-di-essed world, were mounted on a
trium])hal car awaiting the winner or winner's owner.

A FACE IN THE CROWD. 83

And thereafter followed more dancing; nay, through
the whole day, says an old chronicler at the beginning of
th'at century, there were weddings and the grandest gath-
erings, Avith so much piping, music and song, with balls
and feasts and gladness and ornament, that this earth
might have been mistaken for Paradise!

In this year of 1492, it was, perhaps, a little less easy to
make that mistake. Lorenzo the magnificent and subtle
Avas dead, and an arrogant, incautious Piero was come in
his room, an evil change for Florence, unless, indeed, the
wise horse prefers the bad rider, as more easily thrown
from the saddle; and already the regrets for Lorenzo Avere
getting less predominant OA'er the murmured desire for
government on a broader basis, in Avhich corruption might
be arrested, and there might be that free play for every-
body's Jealousy and ambition, which made the ideal liberty
of the good old quarrelsome, struggling times, Avlien Flor-
ence raised her great buildings, reared her own soldiers,
drove out Avould-be tyrants at the SAVord's point, and Avas
proud to keep faith at her oAvn loss. Lorenzo Avas dead.
Pope Innocent was dying, and a troublesome Neapolitan
succession, Avith an intriguing, ambitious Milan, might set
Italy by the ears before long: the times were likely to be
difficult. Still, there was all the more reason that the
Republic should keep its religious festivals.

And Midsummer morning, in this year, 1492, Avas not
less bright than usual. It Avas betimes in the morning
that the symbolic offerings to be carried in grand proces-
sion Avere all assembled at their starting-point n\ the
Piazza della Signoria — that famous piazza, Avhere stood
then, and stand noAv, the massive turreted Palace of the
People, called the Palazzo Vecchio, and the spacious
Loggia, built by Orcagna — the scene of all grand State
ceremonial. The sky made the fairest blue tent, and under
it the bells SAvung so vigorously that every evil spirit with
sense enough to be formidable, must long since haA-e taken
his flight; AvindoAvs and terraced roofs were alive Avith
human faces; sombre stone houses Avere bright Avith hang-
ing draperies; the boldly soaring palace tower, the yet
older square toAver of the Bargello, and the spire of the
neighboring Badia seemed to keep Avatch above; and beloAV,
on the ))road polygonal flags of the piazza, Avas the glorious
shoAv of banners, and horses Avith rich trappings, and
gigantic ce7n or tapers, that Avere fitly called toAA'ers —
strangely aggrandized descendants of "those torches by

84 kOMOLA.

whose faint light the Church worshipped in the Cata-
combs. Betimes in the morning all processions had need
to move under the Midsummer sky of Florence, where the
shelter of the narrow streets must every now and then be
exchanged for the glare of wide spaces; and the sun would
be high up in the heavens before the long pomp had ended
its pilgrimage in the Piazza di San Giovanni.

But here, where the procession Avas to pause, the mag-
nificent city, with its ingenious Cecca, had provided
another tent than the sky; for the whole of the Piazza
del Duomo, from the octagonal baptistery in the centre to
the fagade of the cathedral and the walls of the houses on
the other sides of the quadrangle, was covered, at the
height of forty feet or more, with blue drapery, adorned
with well-stitched yellow lilies and the familiar coats of
arms, while sheaves of many-colored banners drooped at fit
angles under this superincumbent blue — a gorgeous rain-
bow lit shelter to the waiting spectators who leaned from
the windows, and made a narrow border on the pavement,
and wished for the coming of the show.

One of these spectators was Tito Melema. Bright, in
the midst of brightness, he sat at the window of the
room above Nello's shop, his right elbow resting on the
red drapery hanging from the window-sill, and his head
supported in a backward position by the right hand, which
pressed the curls against his ear. llis face wore that bland
liveliness, as far removed from excitability as from heavi-
ness or gloom, which marks the companion popular alike
amongst men and women — the companion who is never
obtrusive or noisy from uneasy vanity or excessive animal
spirits, and whose brow is never contracted by resentment
or indignation. He showed no other change from the two
months and more that had passed since his first appear-
ance in the weather-stained tunic and hose, than that
added radiance of good fortune, which is like the just per-
ceptible perfecting of a flower after it has drunk a morn-
ing's sunbeams. Close behind him, ensconced in the nar-
row angle between his chair and the window-frame, stood
the slim figure of Nello in holiday suit, and at his left the
younger Cennini — Pietro, the erudite corrector of proof-
sheets, not Domenico the practical. Tito was looking
alternately down on the scene below, and upward at the
varied knot of gazers and talkers immediately around him,
some of whom had come in after witnessing the commence-
ment of the procession in the Piazza della Signoria. Piero

A I'ACE IN THE CROWD. 85

di Cosimo was raising a laugh among them by his grimaces
and anathemas at the noise of the bells, against which uo
kind of ear-stuffing was a sufficient barricade, since the
more he stuffed his ears the more he felt the vibration of
his skull; aud declaring that he would bury himself in the
most solitary spot of the Valdarno on a festa, if he were
not condemned, as a painter, to lie in wait for the secrets
of color that were sometimes to be caught from the float-
ing of banners and the chance grouping of the multitude,

Tito had just turned his laughing face away from the
whimsical painter to look down at the small drama going
on among the checkered border of spectators, when at the
angle of the marble steps in front of the Duomo, nearly
opposite Nello's shop, he saw a man's face upturned
toward him, and fixing on him a gaze that seemed to have
more meaning in it than the ordinary passing observation
of a stranger. It was a face with tonsured head, that
rose above the black mantle and white tunic of a Domini-
can friar — a very common sight in Florence; but the
glance had something peculiar in it for Tito. There was
a faint suggestion in it, certainly not of an unpleasant
kind. Yet what pleasant association had he ever had
with monks? None. The glance and the suggestion'
hardly took longer than a flash of lightning.

''Nello!" said Tito, hastily, but immediately added, in
a tone of disappointment, "Ah, he has turned round. It
was that tall, thin friar who is going up the steps. I
wanted you to tell me if you knew aught of him?"

"One of the Frati Predicatori," said Nello, carelessly;
"you don't expect me to know the private history of the
crows."

"I seem to remember something about his face,'^ said
Tito. "It is an uncommon face.'"

"What? you thought it might be our Fra Girolamo?
Too tall; and he never shows himself in that chance way."

"Besides, that loud-barking Hiound of the Lord' * is
not in Florence just now," said Francesco Cei, the
popular poet; "he has taken Piero de Medici's hint, to
carry his railing prophecies on a journey for a while."

"The Frate neither rails nor prophesies against any
man," said a middle-aged personage seated at the other
corner of the window; " he only prophesies against vice.

♦A play on the name of the Dominicans {Domini Canes) which was
accepted by themselves, and which is pictoi-ially represented in a fresco
painted tor them by Simone Memmi.

80 KOMOLA.

If you tliiiik that an attack on your poems, Francesco, it
is not the Frate's fault.''

"All, he's gone into the Duomo, now," said Tito, who
had watched the ligu re eagerly. ''No, I was not under
that mistake, Nello. Your Fra Girolamo has a high nose
and a large under-liji. I saw him once — he is not
handsome; but this man "

"Truce to your descriptions!" said Cennini. "^'Hark!
seel Here come the horsemen and the banners. That
standard," he continued, laying his hand familiarly on
Tito's shoulder — ''that carried on the horse with white
trappings — that with the red eagle holding the green
dragon between his talons, and the red lily over the
eagle — is the Uonfalon of the Cluelf party, and those
cavaliers close round it are the chief officers of the Guelf
party. That is one of our proudest banners, grumble as
we may; it means the triumph of the Guelf s, which means
the triumph of Florentine will, which means the triumph
of the popolani."

"Nay, go on, Cennini," said the middle-aged man,
seated at the window, "which means triumph of the fat
popolani over the lean, which again means triumph of the
fattest popolani over those who are less fat."

" Cronaca, you are becoming sententious," said the
printer; "Fra Girolamo's preaching will spoil you, and
make you take life by the wrong handle. Trust me, your
cornices will lose half their beauty if you begin to miugle
bitterness with them; that^is the maniera Tedesca v^hich.
you used to declaim against when you came from Rome.
The next palace you build we shall see you trying to put
the Frate's doctrine into stone."

" That is a goodly show of cavaliers," said Tito, who had
learned by this time the best way to please Florentines;
"but are there not strangers among them? I see foreign
costumes. "

"Assuredly," said Cennini; "you see there the Orators
from France, Milan, and Venice, and behind them are
English and German nobles; for it is customary that all
foreign visitors of distinction pay their tribute to San
Giovanni in the train of that gonfalon. For my part, I
think our Florentine cavaliers sit their horses as well as any
of those cut-and-thrust northerners, whose wits lie in their
heels and saddles; and for yon Venetian, I fancy he would
feel himself more at ease on the back of a dolphin. We
ought to know something of horsemanship, for we excel all

A FACE IX THE CROWD. 87

Italy in the sports of tlie Giostra, and -the money vre spend
on them. Bnt you will see a finer show of our chief men
by-and-by, Melema; my brother himself will be among the
ofiicers of the Zecca.''

" The banners are the better sight," said Piero di Cos-
imo, forgetting the noise in his delight at the winding
stream of color as the tributary standards advanced round
the piazza. " The Florentine men are so-so; thev make
but a sorry sho«' at this distance with their patch of sallow
flesh-tint above the black garments; but those banners with
their velvet, and satin, and minever, and brocade, and
their endless play of delicate light and shadow! — Va! your
human talk and doings are a tame jest; the only passionate
life is in form and color."

"Ay, Piero, if Satanasso could paint, thou wouldst sell
thy soul to learn his secrets," said Xello. "But there is
little likelihood of it, seeing the blessed angels themselves
are such poor hands at chiaroscuro, if one may judge from
their capo-cV opera, the Madonna Xunziata."

"There go the banners of Pisa and Arezzo," said Cen-
nini. "Ay, Messer Pisano, it is no use for you to look
sullen; you may as well carry your banner "to our San
Giovanni with a good grace. "^ ' Pisans false, Florentines
blind ' — the second balf of that proverb will hold no longer.
There come the ensigns of our subject towns and signories,
Melema; they will all be suspended in San Giovanni until
this day next year, when they will give place to new ones."

"They are a fair sight," said Tito; "and San Giovanni
will surely be as well satisfied with that produce of Italian
looms as Minerva with her peplos, especially as he contents
himself with so little drapery. But my eyes are less
delighted with those whirling towers, Avhich ' would soon
make me fall from the window in sympathetic vertigo."

The "towers" of which Tito spoke were a part of the
procession esteemed very glorious by the Florentine popu-
lace; and being perhaps chiefly a kind of hvperbole for the
all-eflicacious wax taper, were also called ceri. But inas-
much as hyperbole is impracticable in a real and literal
fashion, these gigantic ceri, some of them so large as to be
of necessity carried on wheels, were not solid but hollow,
and had their surface made not solely of wax, but of wood
and pasteboard, gilded, carved, and painted, as real sacred
tapers often are. with successive circles of figures — warriors
01] horseback, foot-soldiers witli lance and shield, dancing
maidens, animals, trees and fruits, and in fine, says the old

88 ROMOLA.

clironicler, '^all things that could delight tlie eye and the
heart"; the hollo wness having the further advantage that
men could stand inside these hyperbolic tapers and whirl
them continually, so as to produce a phantasmagoric effect,
which, considering the towers were numerous, must have
been calculated to produce dizziness on a truly magnificent
scale.

"' Pestiletiza!" said Piero di Cosimo, moving from the
window, " those whirling circles one above the other are
worse than the jangling of all the bells. Let me know
when the last taj^er has passed.'^

" Nay, you will surely like to be called when the con-
tadini come carrying their torches," said Nello; ''you
would not miss the country-folk of the Mugello and the
Casentino, of whom your favorite Lionardo would make a
hundred grotesque sketches,"

"No," said Piero, resolutely, "1 will see nothing till the
car of the Zecca comes. I have seen clowns enough hold-
ing tapers aslant, both with and without cowls, to last me
for my life."

"Here it comes, then, Piero — the car of the Zecca,"
called out Nello, after an interval during Avhich towers
and tapers in a descending scale of size had been making
their slow transit.

" Fediddio ! " exclaimed Francesco Cei, "that is a well-
tanned San Giovanni! some sturdy Romagnole beggar-man,
I'll warrant. Our Signoria plays tlie host to all the Jewish
and Christian scum that every other city shuts its gates
against, and lets them fatten on us like St. Anthony's
swine."

The car of the Zecca or Mint, which had just rolled into
sight, was originally an immense wooden tower or cero
adorned after the same fashion as the other tributary ceri,
moimted on a s})lendid car, and drawn by two mouse-
colored oxen, whose mild heads looked out from rich trap-
pings bearing the arms of the Zecca. But the latter half of
the century was getting rather ashamed of the towers
with their circular or spiral paintings, which had delighted
the eyes and the hearts of the other half, so that they had
become a contemptuous proverb, and any ill-iminted figure
looking, as will sometimes happen to figures in the best
ages of art, as if it had been boned for a pie, was called a
fantoccio da cero, a tower-puppet; consequently improved
taste, with Cecca to hoi]) it, had devised for the magnifi-
cent Zecca a triumphal car like a pyramidal catafalque,

A FACE IN THE CROWD. 89

with ingenious wheels warranted to turn all corners easily.
Round the base weie living- figures of saints and angels
arrayed in sculpturesque fashion; and on the summit"^ at
the height of thirty feet, well bound to an iron rod and
holding an iron cross also firmly infixed, stood a living
representative of St. John the Baptist, with arms and legs
bare, a garment of tiger-skins about his body, and a golden
nimbus fastened on his head— as the Precursor was wont
to appear in the cloisters and churches, not having yet
revealed himself to painters as the brown and sturdy boy
who made one of the Holy Family. For where could the
image of the patron saint be more fitly placed than on the
symbol of the Zecca? Was not the royal prerogative of
coming money the surest token tliat a city had won its
independence? and by the blessing of San Giovanni this
'^ beautiful sheepfold" of his had shown that token earliest
among the Italian cities. Nevertheless, the annual function
of representing the patron saint was not among the high
prizes of public life; it was paid for witli something like ten
shillings, a cake weighing fourteen pounds, two bottles of
wme, and a handsome supply of light eatables; the money
being furnished by the magnificent Zecca, and the payment
m kind being by peculiar ''privilege " presented in a basket
suspended on a pole from an upper window of a private
house, whereupon the eidolon of tlie austere saint at once
invigorated himself with a reasonable share of the sweets
and wine, threw the remnants to the crowd, and embraced
the mighty cake securely with his right arm through the
remainder of his passage. Tliis was the attitude in which
the mimic San Giovanni presented himself as the tall car
jerked and vibrated on its slow way round the piazza to
the northern gate of the Baptisterv. "

"There go the Masters of the Zecca, and there is my
brother— you see him, Melema?" cried Cennini, with an
agreeable stirring of pride at showing a stranger what was
too familiar to be remarkable to fellow-citizens. "Behind
come the members of the Corporation of Calimara,* the
dealers m foreign cloth, to which we have given our
-blorentme finish; men of ripe years, you see, who were
matriculated before you were born; and then comes the
famous Art of Money-changers."

" Many of them matriculated also to the noble art of
usury before you were born," interrupted Francesco Cei,

poratlon^^ ^* Calimara," "ai-te" being, in this use of it, equivalent to cor-

90 ROMOLA .

"as you may discern by a certain fitful glare of the eye
and sharp curve of the nose which manifest their descent
from the ancient Harpies, whose portraits you saw sup-
porting the arms of the Zecca. Shaking off old prejudices
now, such a procession as that of some four hundred pass-
ably ugly men carrying their tapers in open daylight,
Diogenes-fashion, as if they were looking for a lost quat-
trino, would make a merry spectacle for the Feast of Fools."

"Blaspheme not against the usages of our city," said
Pietro Cennini, much offended. "There are new wits
who think they see things more truly because they stand
on their heads to look at them, like tumblers and mounte-
banks instead of keeping the attitude of rational men.
Doubtless it makes little difference to Maestro Vaiano's
monkeys w^hether they see our Donatello's statue of
Juditli with their heads or their tails uppermost."

" Your solemnity will allow some quarter to playful
fancy, I hojDC," said Cei, with a shrug, " else what becomes
of the ancients, whose example you scholars are bound to
revere, Messer Pietro? Life was never anything but a
perpetual see-saw between gravity and jest."

" Keep your jest then till your end of the pole is upper-
most," said Cennini, still angry, "and that is not ^hen
the great bond of our Eepublic is expressing itself in
ancient symbols, without which the vulgar would be con-
scious of nothing beyond their own petty wants of back
and stomach, and never rise to the sense of community in
religion and law. There has been no great people without
processions, and the man who thinks himself too wise to
be moved by them to anything but contempt, is like the
puddle that was proud of standing alone while the river
rushed by."

No one said anything after this indignant burst of
Cennini's till he liimself spoke again.

"Hark! the trumpets of the Signoria: now comes the
last stage of the show, Melema. That is our Gonfaloniere
in the middle, in the starred mantle, with the sword
carried before him. Twenty years ago we used to see our
foreign Podesta, who was our judge in civil causes, walk-
ing on his right hand; but our Republic has been over-
doctored by clever Medici. Tliat is the Proposto* of the
Priori on the left; then come the other seven Priori; then
all the other magistracies and officials of our Republic.
You see your patron the Segretario?"

* Spokesman or Moderator,

A FATE IX THE ( KOAVD. 9]

'''There is Me>sei- Bernardo del Xero also." said Tito:
'■his viage is a fine and venerable one, though it has worn
rather a petrifying look toward nie. *'

•'Ah/' said Xello. "he is the dragon that guards the
remnant of old Bardo's gold, which, T fancy, is chiefly
that virgin gold that falls about the fair Eomola's head
and shoulders; eh, my Apollino?'' he added, patting
Tito's head.

Tito had the youthful grace of blushing, but he had
also the adroit and ready speech that prevents a Ijlush
from looking like embarrassment. He replied at once —

''And a very Pactolus it is — a stream with golden
ripples. If I were an alchemist — "

He was saved from the need f-or further speech by the
sudden fortissimo of drums and trumpets and fifes, burst-
ing into the breadth of the piazza in a grand storm of
sound — a roar, a blast, and a whistling, well befitting a
city famous for its musical instruments, and reducing the
members of the closest group to a state of deaf isolation.

During this interval Xello observed Tito's fingers 'mov-
ing in recognition of some one in the crowd below, but not
seeing the direction of his glance he failed to detect the
object of this greeting — the sweet round blue-eyed face
under a white hood — immediately lost in the narrow border
of heads, where there was a continual eclipse of round
contadina cheeks by the harsh-lined features or bent shoul-
ders of an old spadesman, and where profiles turned as
sharply from iiortli to south as weather-cocks under a
shifting wind.

But when it was felt that the show was ended — when
the twelve prisoners released in honor of the day, and the
very barheri or race-horses, with the arms of their owners
embroidered on their cloths, had followed up the Signoria,
and been duly consecrated to San Giovanni, and every one
was moving from the window — Xello, whose Florentine
curiosity was of that lively, canine sort which thinks no
trifle too despicable for investigation, put his hand on
Tito's shoulder and said —

" What acquaintance was that you were making sig-nals
to, eh, giovane mio?^'

"Some little contadina who probably mistook me for an
acquaintance, for she had honored meVith a greeting."

"Or who wished to begin an acquaintance." said Xello.
"But you are bound for the Via de Bardi and the feast of
the Muses: there is no counting on you for a frolic, else we

\}-Z ROMOLA.

might liiive gone in search of adventures together in the
crowd, and had some pleasant fooling in honor of San
Giovanni. But your high fortune has come on you too
soon: I don't mean the professor's mantle — that is roomy

enougli to hide a few stolen chickens, but Messer

Endymion minded his manners after that singular good
fortune of his; and what says our Luigi Pulci?

' Da quel grioj'no in qua ch'amor ra'accese
Per lei son fatto e g'cntile e cortese." "

" Nello, amico mio, thou hast an intolerable trick of
making life stale by forestalling it with thy talk," said
Tito, shrugging his shoulders, with the look of patient
resignation, which was his nearest approach to anger:
"not to mention that such ill founded babbling would be
held a great offense by that same goddess whose humble
worshipper you are always professing yourself."

" I Avill be mute," said Ncllo, laying his finger on his
lips, with a responding shrug. " But it is only under our
four" eyes that I talk any folly about her."

"Pardon! you were on the verge of it just now in the
hearing of others. If you want to ruin me in the minds
of Bardo and his daughter "

" Enough, enough!" said Nello. "I am an absurd old
barber. It all comes from that abstinence of mine, in not
making bad verses in my youth: for want of letting my
folly run out that way when I was eighteen, it runs out at
my tongue's end now I am at the unseemly age of fifty.
But Nello has not got his head muffled for all that; he can
see a buffalo in the snow. Addio, giovcuie mio."

CHAPTER IX.

A man's raxsom.

Tito was soon down among the crowd, and, notwith-
standing his indifferent reply to Xello's question about his
chance acquaintance, he was not without a passing wish,
as he made his way round the piazza to the Corso degli
Adimari, tliat he might encounter the pair of blue eyes
whicii had looked up toward him from under the square
bit of white linen drapery that formed the ordinary hood

A man's ransom. 93

of the contadina at festa time. He was perfectly well
aware that that face was Tessa's; but he had not chosen to
say so. What had Nelloto do with the matter? Tito had
an innate love of reticence — let us say a talent for it —
Avhich acted as other impulses do, without any conscious
motive, and, dike all people to whom concealment is easy,
he would now and then conceal something which had as
little the nature of a secret as the fact that he had seen a
flight of crows.

But the passing wish about 2:»retty Tessa Avas almost
immediately eclipsed by the recurrent recollection of that
friar whose face had some irrecoverable association for him.
Why should a sickly fanatic, worn with fasting, have looked
at him in particular, and where in all his travels could he
remember encountering that face before? Folly! such
vague memories hang about the mind like cobwebs, with
tickling importunity — best to sweep them away with a
dash: and Tito had preasanter occupation for his thoughts.
By the time he was turning out of the Corso degli Adimari
into a side-street he was caring only that the sun was high,
and that the jirocession had kept him longer than he had
intended from his visit to that room in the Via de Bardi,
where his coming, he knew, was anxiously awaited. He
felt the scene of his entrance beforehand: the joy beaming
diffiusedly in the blind face like the light in a semi-trans-
parent lamp; the transient pink flush on Komola's face
and neck, which subtracted nothing from her majesty, but
only gave it the exquisite charm of womanly sensitiveness,
heightened still more by what seemed the paradoxical boy-
like frankness of her look and smile. They were the best
comrades in the world during the hours they passed
togetlier round the blind man's chair: she was constantly
appealing to Tito, and he was informing her, yet he felt
himself strangely in subjection to Eomola with that sim-
plicity of hers: he felt for the first time, without defining it
to himself, that loving awe in the presence of noble woman-
hood, which is perhaps something like the worship paid of
old to a great nature-goddess, who was not all-knowing,
but whose life and power were something deeper and more
primordial than knowledge. They had never been alone
together, and he could frame to himself no probable image
of love-scenes between them: he could only fancy and wish
wildly — what he knew was impossible — that Romola would
some day tell him that she loved him. One day in Greece,
as he was leaning over a wall in the sunshine^ a little black-

94 ROMOLA.

eyed peasant girl, who had rested her water-pot on the
wall, crept gradually nearer and nearer to him, and at last
shyly asked him to kiss her, putting up her round olive
cheek very innocently. Tito was used to love that came
in this unsought fashion. But Eomola's love would never
come in that way: would it ever come at all? — and yet it was
that topmost apple on which he had set his mind. He was
in his fresh youth — not passionate, but impressible: it was
as inevitable that he should feel lovingly toward Romola
as that the white irises should be reflected in the clear
sunlit stream; but he had no coxcombry, and he had an
intimate sense that Romola was something very much
above him. Many men have felt the same before a large-
eyed, simple child.

Nevertheless, Tito had had the rapid success which
would have made some men presuming, or would have
warranted him in thinking that there would be no great
presumption in entertaining an agreeable confidence that
he might one day be the husband of Romola — nay, that
her father himself was not without a vision of such a
future for him. His first auspicious interview with Bar-
tolommeo Scala had proved the commencement of a
growing favor on the secretary's part, and had led to an
issue which would have been enough to make Tito decide
on Florence as the place in which to establish himself, even
if it had held no other magnet. Politian was professor of
Greek as well as Latin at Florence, ])rofessorial chairs
being maintained there, although the university had been
removed to Pisa; but for a long time Demetrio Calcondila,
one of the most eminent and respectable among the emi-
grant Greeks, had also held a Greek chair, simultaneously
with the too predominant Italian. Calcondila was now
gone to Milan, and there was no counterpoise or rival to
Politian such as was desired for him by the friends who
wished him to be taught a little propriety and humility.
Scala was far from being the only friend of this class, and
he found several who, if they were not among those
thirsty admirers of mediocrity that were glad to be
refreshed with his verses in hot weather, were yet quite
willing to join him in doing that moral service to Politian.
It was finally agreed that Tito should be sujjported in a
Greek chair, as Demetrio Calcondila had been by Lorenzo
himself, who, being at the same time the affectionate
patron of Politian, had shown by precedent that there was
nothing invidious in such a measure, but only a zeal for

A MAN S RAXSO.M. 95

true learning and for the instruction of the Florentine
youth.

Tito was thus sailing under the fairest breeze, and
besides convincing fair judges that his talents squared
with his good fortune, he AA'ore that fortune so easily and
unpretentiously that no one had yet been offended by it.
He was not unlikely to get into the best Florentine soci-
ety: society where there was much more jjlate than the
circle of enameled silver in the centre of the brass dishes,
and where it was not forbidden by the Signory to wear the
richest brocade. For where could a handsome young
scholar not be welcome when he could touch the lute and
troll a gay song? That bright face, that easy smile, that
liquid voice, seemed to give life a holiday aspect; just as
a strain of gay music and the hoisting of colors make the
A\ork-worn and the sad rather ashamed of showing them-
selves. Here was a professor likely to render the Greek
classics amiable to the sons of great houses.

And that was not the whole of Tito's good fortune; for
he had sold all his jewels, except the ring he did not
choose to part with, and he was master of full five hundred
gold florins.

Yet the moment when he first had this sum in his pos-
session was the crisis of the first serious struggle his
facile, good-humored nature had known. An importunate
thought, of which he had till now refused to see more than
the shadoAv as it dogged his footsteps, at last rushed upon
him and grasped him: he was obliged to pause and decide
whether he would surrender and obev, or whether he
would give the refitsal that must carry 'irrevocable conse-
qiiences. It was in the room above Xello's shop, which
Tito had now hired as a lodging, that the elder Cennini
handed him the last quota of the sum on behalf of Ber-
nardo Eucellai, the purchaser of the two most valuable
gems.

'' Ecco, (jiovanemiol" said the respectable printer and
goldsmith, "you have now a pretty little fortune; and if
you will take my advice, you will let me place your florins
m a safe quarter, where they mav increase and multiply,
instead of slipping through your fingers for banquets and
other follies which are rife among our Florentine youth.
And it has been too much the fashion of scholars, especially
when, like our Pietro Crinito, they think their scholar-
ship needs to be scented and broidered, to squander with
one hand till they have been fain to beg with the other.

96 ROMOLA. ,

I have brought you the money, and you are free to make a
Avise choice or an unwise: I shall see on which side the
balance dips. We Florentines hold no man a member of
an art till he has shown his skill and been matriculated;
and no man is matriculated to the art of life till he has
been well tempted. If you make u]p your mind to put
your florins out to usury, you can let me know to-morrow.
A scholar may marry, and should have something in readi-
ness for the morgan-cap* Addio."

As Cennini closed the door behind him, Tito turned
round with the smile dying out of his face, and fixed his
eyes on the table where the florins lay. He made no other
movement, but stood with his thumbs in his belt, looking
down, in that transfixed state which accompanies the con-
centration of consciousness on some inward image.

'^A man's ransom!" — who was it that had said five
hundred florins was more than a man's ransom? If now,
under this midday sun, on some hot coast far away, a man
somewhat stricken in years — a man not without high
thoughts and with the most passionate heart — a man who
long years ago had rescued a little boy from a life of beg-
gary, filth, and cruel wrong, had reared him tenderly, and
been to him as a father — if that man were now under this
summer sun toiling as a slave, hewing wood and drawing
water, perhaps being smitten and buffeted because he was
not deft and active? If he were saying to himself, "Tito
will find me: he had but to carry our manuscripts and gems
to Venice; he will have raised money, and will never rest till
he finds me out"? If that were certain, could he, Tito,
see the price of the gems lying before him, and say, "^I will
stay at Florence, where I am fanned by soft airs of prom-
ised love and prosperity; I will not risk myself for his
sake"? No, surely not, if it loere certain. But nothing-
could be farther from certainty. The galley had been
taken by a Turkish vessel on its way to Delos: tliat was
known by the report of the companion galley, Avhich had
escaped. But there had been resistance, and probable
bloodshed; a man had been seen falling overboard: who
were the survivors, and what had befallen them amongst
all the multitude of possibilities? Had not he, Tito, suf-
fered shipwreck, and narrowly escaped drowning? He had
good cause for feeling the omnipresence of casualties that
threatened all projects with futility. The rumor that

* A sum given by the bridegroom to the bride the day after the marriage
(Mm^gengahc).

A man's ransom. 97

there were pirates who had a settlement in Delos was not
to be depended on, or might be nothing to the purpose.
What, probably enough, would be the result if he were to
quit Florence and go to Venice; get authoritative letters-
yes, he knew that might be done—and set out for the
Archipelago? Why, that he should be himself seized, and
spend all his florins on preliminaries, and be again a desti-
tute wanderer — with no more gems to sell.

Tito had a clearer vision of that result than of the possi-
ble mement when he might find his father again, and carry
hmi deliverance. It would surely be an unfairness that
he, m his full ripe youth, to whom life had hitherto had
some of the stint and subjection of a school, should turn
his back on promised love and distinction, and perhaps
never be visited by that promise again. ''And yet," he
said to himself, "if I were certain that Baldassarre Calvo
was alive, and that I could free him, by whatever exertions
or perils, I would go now— now I have the money: it was
useless to debate the matter before. I would go now to
Bardo^^and Bartolommeo Scala, and tell them the whole
truth." Tito did not say to himself so distinctly that if
those two men had known the whole truth he was aware
there would have been no alternative for him but to go in
search of his benefactor, who, if alive, was the rightful
owner of the gems, and- whom he had always equivocally
spoken of as "lost"; he did not say to himself— what he
was not ignorant of— that Greeks of distinction had made
sacrifices, taken voyages again and again, and sought help
from crowned and mitred heads for the sake of freeing
relatives from slavery to the Turks. Public opinion did
not regard this as exceptional virtue.

This was his first real colloquy with himself: he had gone
on following the impulses of the moment, and one of those
impulses had been to conceal half the fact; he had never
considered this part of his conduct long enough to face
tlie consciousness of his motives for the concealment.
U hat was the use of telling the whole? It was true, the
thought had crossed his mind several times since he had
quitted A'auplia that, after all, it was a great relief to be
quit of Baldassarre, and he would have liked to know ivho
it was that had fallen overboard. But such thoughts spring
mevitably out of a relation that is irksome. Baldassarre
was exacting, and had got stranger as he got older: he
was constantly scrutinizing Tito's mind to see whether it
answered to his own exaggerated expectations; and age —

9S ROMOLA.

the age of a thick-set, heavy-browed, bald man beyond
sixty, whose intensity and eagerness in the grasp of ideas
have long taken the character of monotony and repetition,
may be looked at from many points of view without being
found attractive. Such a man, stranded among new
acquaintances unless he had the philosopher's stone, M^ould
hardly find rank, youth and beauty at his feet. The feel-
ings that gather fervor from novelty will be of little help
toward making the world a home for dimmed and faded
human beings; and if there is any love of which they are
not widowed, it must be the love that is rooted in memo-
ries and distils perpetually the sweet balms of fidelity and
forbearing tenderness.

But surely such memories were not absent from Tito's
mind? Far in the backward vista of his remembered life,
when he was only seven years old, Baldassarre had rescued
him from blows, had taken him to a home that seemed like
opened paradise, where there was sweet food and soothing-
caresses, all had on Baldassarre's knee; and from that time
till the hour they had parted, Tito had been the one centre
of Ikldassarre's fatherly cares.

And he had been docile, pliable, quick of apprehension,
ready to acquire: a very bright lovely boy, a youth of even
splendid grace, who seemed quite without vices, as if that
beautiful form represented a vitality so exquisitely poised
and balanced that it could know no uneasy desires, no
unrest — a radiant presence for a louely man to have won
for himself. If he were silent when his father expected
some response, still he did not look moody; if he declined
some labor — why, he flung himself down with such a charm-
ing, half-smiling, half-pleading air, that the pleasure of
looking at him made amends to one who had watched his
growth Avith a sense of claim and possession; the curves of
Tito's mouth had ineffable good-humor in them. And
then, the quick talent to which everything came readily,
from philosophical systems to the rhymes of a street ballad
caught up at a hearing! Would any one have said that
Tito had not made a rich return to his benefactor, or that
his gratitude and affection would fail on any great demand?

He did not admit that his gratitude had failed; but it
was not certain that Baldassarre was in slavery, not certain
that he was living.

*'Do I not owe something to myself?" said Tito,
inwardly, with a slight movement of his shoulders, the
first he had made since he had turned to look down at the

A man's ransom. 99

florins. "Before I quit everything, and incur again all
the risks of which I am even now weary, I must at least
have a reasonable hope. Am I to spend my life in a wan-
dering search? / believe he is dead, Cennini was right
about my florins: I will place them in his hands to-morrow."

When, the next morning, Tito put this determination
into act he had chosen his color in the game, and had
given an inevitable bent to his wishes. He had made it
impossible that he should not from henceforth desire it to
be the truth that his father was dead; impossible that he
should not be tempted to baseness rather than that the
precise facts of his conduct should not remain forever
concealed.

Under every guilty secret there is hidden a brood of
guilty wishes, whose unwholesome infecting life is cher-
ished by the darkness. The contaminating effect of deeds
often lies less in the commission than in the consequent
adjustment of our desires — tlie enlistment of our self-
interest on the side of falsity; as, on the other hand, the
purifying influence of public confession springs from the
fact, that by it the hope in lies is forever swept away, and
the soul recovers the noble attitude of simplicity.

Besides, in this first distinct colloquy with himself the
ideas which had previously been scattered and interrui)ted
had now concentrated themselves; the little rills of selfish-
ness had united and made a channel, so that they could
never again meet with the same resistance. Hitherto Tito
had left in vague indecision the question whether, with
the means in his power, he would not return, and ascertain
his father's fate; he had now made a definite excuse to
himself for not taking that course; he had avowed to him-
self a choice which he would have been ashamed to avow to
others, and which would have made him ashamed in the
resurgent j^resence of his fatlier. But the inward shame
the reflex of that outward law which the great heart of
mankind makes for every individual man, a reflex which
will exist even in the absence of the sympathetic impulses
that need no law, but rush to the deed of fidelity and pity
as inevitably as the brute mother shields her young from
the attack of the hereditary enemy — that inward shame
was showing its blushes in Tito's determined assertion to
himself that his father was dead, or that at least search
was hopeless.

100 RO.MOLA.

CHAPTER X.

UNDER THE PLAN"E-TEEE.

On" the day of San Giovanni, it was already three weeks
ago that Tito had handed his florins to Cennini, and we
have seen that as he set out toward the Via de I3ardi he
showed all the outward signs of a mind at ease. How
should it be otherwise? He never jarred with what Avas
immediately around him, and his nature was too joyous,
too unajiprehensive, for the hidden and tlie distant to
grasp him in the shape of a dread. As he turned out of
the hot sunshine into the shelter of a narrow street, took
off the black cloth berretta, or simple cap with upturned
lappet, which just crowned his brown curls, pushing his
hair and tossing his head backward to court the cooler
air, there was no brand of duplicity on his brow; neither
Avas there any stamp of candor: it Avas simply a finely-
formed, square, smooth young brow. And the sIoav
absent glance he cast around at the upper windoAvs of the
houses had neither more dissimulation in it, nor more
ingenuousness, than belongs to a youthful AA'ell-opened
eyelid Avith its unwearied breadth of gaze; to perfectly pel-
lucid lenses; to the undimmed dark of a rich brown iris;
and to a pure cerulean-tinted angle of Avhiteness streaked
Avith the delicate shadows of long eyelashes. Was it that
Tito's face attracted or repelled according to the mental
attitude of the observer? Was it a cipher Avith more than j
one key? The strong, unmistakable expression in his I
whole air and person Avas a negative one, and it was per-
fectly veracious; it declared the absence of any uneasy
claim, any restless vanity, and it made the admiration
that folloAved him as he passed among the troop of holiday-
makers a thoroughly Avilling tribute.

For by this time the stir of the Festa was felt even in
the narroAvest side-streets; the throng Avhich had at one
time been concentrated in the lines through which the
procession had to pass, Avas noAv streaming out in all
directions in pursuit of a new object. Such intervals of
a Festa are precisely the moments when the vaguely active
animal spirits of a croAvd are likely to be the most petu-
lant and most ready to sacrifice a stray individual to the
greater happiness of the greater number. As Tito entered

UNDEPv THE PLAXE-TKEE. 101

the neighborhood of San Martino, he found the throng
rather denser; and near the hostelry of the Bertucce, or
Baboons, there was evidently some object which was arrest-
ing the i:)assengers and forming them into a knot. It
needed nothing of great interest to draw aside passengers
nnfreighted with a purpose, and Tito was preparing to
turn aside into an adjoining, when, amidst the loud
laughter, his ear discerned a distressed childish voice
crying, ''Loose me! Holy Virgin help me!" which at once
determined him to push his way into the knot of gazers.
He had just had time to perceive that the distressed
voice came from a young contadina, whose white hood
had fallen off in the struggle to get her hands free from
the grasp of a man in the parti-colored dress of a cerre-
tano, or conjuror, who was making laughing attempts to
soothe and cajole her, evidently carrying with him the
amused sympathy of the spectators. These, by a persuasive
variety of words signifying simpleton, for which the
Florentine dialect is rich in equivalents, seemed to be
arguing with the contadina against her obstinacy. At
the first moment the girl's face was turned away, and he
saw only her light-brown hair plaited and fastened with a
long silver i)in; but in the next the struggle brought her
face opposite Tito's, and he saw the baby features of
Tessa, her blue ej^es tilled with tears, and her nnder-lip
quivering. Tessa, too, saw Mm, and through the mist of
her swelling tears there beamed a sudden hope, like that
in the face of a little child, when, held by a stranger
against its will, it sees a familiar hand stretched out.

In an instant Tito had pushed his way through the
barrier of bystanders, whose curiosity made them ready to
turn aside at the sudden interference of this handsome
young signor, had grasped Tessa's waist, and had said,
''Loose this child! What right have you to hold her
against her will?"

The conjuror — a man with one of those faces in which
the angles of the eyes and eyebrows, of the nostrils, mouth,
and sharply defined jaw, all tend upward — showed his
small regular teeth in an impish but not ill-natured grin,
as he let go Tessa's hands, and stretched out his own
backward, shrugging his shoulders, and bending them for-
ward a little in a half -apologetic, half -protesting manner,

"I mean the ragazza no evil in the world, Messere: ask
this respectable company. I was only going to show them
a few samples of my skill, in which this little damsel

lO'Z KOMOLA.

might have helped me the better because of her kitten
face, which would have assured them of open dealing; and
I had promised her a lapful of confetti as a reward. But
what then? Messer has doubtless better confetti at hand,
and she knows it."

A general laugh among the bystanders accompanied
these last words of the conjuror, raised, probably by the
look of relief and confidence with Avhich Tessa clung to
Tito's arm, as he drew it from her waist, and placed her
hand within it. She only cared about the laugh as she
might have cared about the roar of wild beasts from which
she was escaping, not attaching any meaning to it; but
Tito, who had no sooner got her on his arm than he fore-
saw some embarrassment in the situation, hastened to get
clear of observers who, having been despoiled of an expected
amusement, were sure to re-establish the balance by jests.

"See, see, little one! here is your hood," said the con-
juror, throwing the bit of white drapery over Tessa's head.
"Orsu, bear me no malice; come back to me when Messere
can spare you."

"Ah! Maestro Vaiano, she'll come back presently, as
the toad said to the harrow," called out one of the specta-
tors, seeing how Tessa started and shrank at the action of
the conjuror.

Tito pushed his way vigorously toward the corner of a
side street, a little vexed at this delay in his jorogress to
the Via de Bardi, and intending to get rid of the poor
little contadina as soon as possible. The next street, too,
had its passengers inclined to make holiday remarks on so
unusual a pair; but they had no sooner entered it than he
said, in a kind but hurried manner, " Xow, little one,
where were vou going? Are you come bv yourself to the
Festa?"

"Ah, no! "said Tessa, looking frightened and distressed
again; "I lurve lost my mother in the crowd — her and
my father-in-law. They will be angry — he will beat me.
It was in the crowd in San Pulinari — somebody pushed
me along and I couldn't stop myself^ so I got away from
them. Oh, I don't know where .they're gone! Please,
don't leave me!"

Her eyes had been swelling with tears again, and she
ended with a sob.

Tito hurried along again: the Church of the Badia was
not far off. They could enter it by the cloister that
opened at the back, and in the church he could talk to

UNDEK THE PLANE-TKEE. 103

Tessa — perhaps leave her. No! it was an hour at which
the church was not open; but they paused under the
shelter of the cloister, and he said, " Have you no cousin
or friend in Florence, my little Tessa, whose house you
could fiud; or are you afraid of walking by yourself since
you have been frightened by the conjuror? I am in a
hurry to get to Oltrarno, but if I could take you anywhere
near "

"Oh, I (i/)i frightened: he was the devil — I know he
was. And I don't know where to go. I have nobody:
and my mother meant to have her dinner somewhere,
and I don't know where. Holy Madonna! I shall be
beaten."

The corners of the pouting mouth went down piteously,
and the poor little bosom with the beads on it above the
green serge gown heaved so, that there was no longer any
help for it: a loud sob would come, and the big tears fell
as if they were making up for lost time. Here was a situ-
ation! It would have been brutal to leave her, and Tito's
nature was all gentleness. He wished at that moment that
he had not been expected in the Via de Bardi. As he saw
her lifting up her holiday apron to catch the hurrying
tears, he laid his hand, too, on the apron, and rubbed one
of the cheeks and kissed the baby-like roundness.

" My poor little Tessa! leave off crying. Let us see what
can be done. Where is your home? — where do you live?"

There was no answer, but the sobs began to subside a
little and the drops to fall less quickly.

''Come! I'll take you a little way, if you'll tell me
where you want to go."

The apron fell, and Tessa's face began to look as con-
tented as a cherul)'s budding from a cloud. The diabolical
conjuror, the anger and the beating, seemed a long
Avay off.

"I think I'll go home, if you'll take me," she said,
in a half wbisper, looking up at Tito with wide blue eyes,
and with something sweeter than a smile — with a childlike
calm.

" Come, then, little one," said Tito, in a caressing tone,
putting her arm within his again. " Which way is" it? "

" Beyond Peretola — where the large pear-tree is."

"Peretola? Out at which gate, pazzarella? I am a
stranger, you must remember."

" Out at the Por del Prato," said Tessa, moving along
with a very fast hold on Tito's arm.

104 ROMOLA.

He did not know all the turnings well enough to venture
on an attempt at choosing the quietest streets; and besides,
it occurred to him that where the passengers were most
numerous there was, perhaps, the most chance of meeting
with Monna Ghita and finding an end to his knight-
errantship. So he made straight for Porta Eossa, and
on to Ognissanti, showing his usual bright propitiatory
face to the mixed observers who threw their Jests at him
and his little heavy-shod maiden with much liberality.
jMing^ed w^th the more decent holiday-makers there were
frolicsome apprentices, rather envious of his good fortune:
bold-eyed women with the badge of the yellow veil;
beggars who thrust forward their caps for alms, in derision
at Tito's evident haste; dicers, sharpers, and loungers of
the worst sort; boys whose tongues were used to wag in
concert at the most brutal street games; for the streets of
Florence were not always a moral spectacle in those times,
and Tessa's terror at being lost in the crowd was not
wholly unreasonable.

When they reached the Piazza d'Ognissanti Tito slackened
his pace: they were both heated with their hurried walk,
and here was a wider space where they could take breath.
They sat down on one of the stone benches which were
frequent against the walls of old Florentine houses.

" Holy Virgin!" said Tessa; ''lam glad we have got
away from those women and boys; but I was not frightened,
because you could take care of me."

" Pretty little Tessa! " said Tito, smiling at her. " What
makes you feel so safe with me?"

" Because you are so beautiful — ^like the people going
into Paradise; they are all good."

'^* It is a long while since you had your breakfast, Tessa,"
said Tito, seeing some stalls near, with fruit and sweet-
meats upon them. " Are you hungry?"

''Yes, I think I am — if you will have some too."

Tito bought some apricots, and cakes, and comfits, and
put them into her apron.

"Come," he said, "let us walk on to the Prato, and
then, perhaps, you will not be afraid to go the rest of the
way alone."

" But you will have some of the apricots and things,"
said Tessa, rising obediently and gathering up her apron
as a bag for her store.

"We will see," said Tito aloud; and to himself he said,
" Here is a little contadina who might inspire a better idyl

UXDER THE PLAXE-TREE. 105

than Lorenzo de Medici's 'Nencia da Barbarino/ that
Xello's friends rave about; if I were only a Theocritus, or
had time to cultivate the necessary exi^erience by unseason-
able walks of this sort! However, the mischief is done
now: I am so late already that another half hour will make
no difference. Pretty little jsigeon I "

" We have a garden and plenty of i^ears/' said Tessa,
''and two cows, besides the mules; and I'm very fond of
them. But my father-in-law is a cross man: I wish my
mother had not married him. I think he is wicked; he is
very ugly.''

'•'And does your mother let him beat you, poverina?
You said you were afraid of being beaten."

''Ah, my mother herself scolds me: she loves my young
sister better, and thinks I don't do work enough. 'K'obody
speaks kindly to me, only the Pievano (parish priestj'when
I go to confession. And the men in the ^Mercato laugh
at me and make fun of me. Nobody ever kissed me and
spoke to me as you do; just as I talk to my little black-
faced kid, because I'm very fond of it."

It seemed not to have entered Tessa's mind that there
was any change in Tito's appearance since the morning he
begged the milk from her, and that he looked now like a
personage for whom she must summon her little stock of
reverent words and signs. He had impressed her too dif-
ferently from any human being who had ever come near
her before, for her to make any comparison of details; she
took no note of his dress; he was simply a voice and a face
to her, something come from Paradise'into a world where
most things seemed hard and angry; and she prattled with
as little restraint as if he had been an imaginary compan-
ion born of her own lovingness and the sunshine.

They had now reached the Prato, whiclr at that time
was a large open space within the walls, where the Floren-
tine youth played at their favorite Calcio — a peculiar kind
of football — and otherwise exercised themselves. At this
midday time it was forsaken and quiet to the very gates,
where a tent had been erected in preparation for the race.
On the border of this wide meadow, Tito paused and
said —

"^N'ow, Tessa, you will not be frightened if I leave vou

to walk the rest of the way by youi^elf. Addio! Shall I

come and buy a cup of milk from you in the Mercato

to-morrow morning, to see that you are quite safe?"

He added this question in a soothing tone, as he saw her

lOG ROMOLA.

ej'es widening son'owfully, and tlie corners of her mouth
falling. She said notliing at first; she onl}^ opened her
apron and looked down at her apricots and sweetmeats.
Then she looked up at him again and said complainingly —

" I thought you would have some, and we could sit
down under a tree outside the gate, and eat them
together."

"'Tessa, Tessa, you little siren, you would ruin me,"
said Tito, laughing, and kissing both her cheeks. "I
ought to have been in the Via de Bardi long ago. Xo! I
must go back now; you are in no danger. There — I'll
take an apricot. Addio ! "

lie had already stepped two yards from her when he
said the last word. Tessa could not have spoken; she was
pale, and a great sob was rising; but she turned round as
if she felt there was no hope for her, and stepped on,
holding her apron so forgetfully that the apricots began to
roll out on the grass.

Tito could not help looking after her, and seeing |her
shoulders rise to the bursting sob, and the apricots fall —
could not help going after her and i)icking them up. It
was very hard upon him: he was a long way oif the Via de
Bardi, and very near to Tessa.

" See, my silly one," he said, picking uj) the apricots.
''Come, leave oif crying, I will go with you, and we'll sit
down under the tree. Come, I don't like to see you cry;
but you know I must go back some time."

So it came to pass that they found a great plane-tree not
far outside the gates, and they sat down under it, and all
the feast was spread out on Tessa's lap, she leaning with
her back against the trunk of the tree, and he stretched
opposite to her, resting his elbows on the rough green
growth cherished by the shade, while the sunlight stole
through the boughs and played about them like a winged
thing. Tessa's face was all contentment again, and the
taste of the apricots and sweetmeats seemed very good.

''You pretty bird!" said Tito, looking at her as she sat
eyeing the remains of the feast with an evident mental
debate about saving them, since he had said he would not
have any more. "To think of any one scolding you!-
What sins do you tell of at confession, Tessa?"

"Oh, a great many. I am often naughty. I don't like
work, and I can't help being idle, though I know I shall
be beaten and scolded; and I give the mules the best
fodder when nobody sees me, and then when the Madre is

UNDER THE PLANE-TREE. lO'J'

angry I say I didn't do it, and that makes me frightened
at the devil. I think the conjuror was the devil. I am
not so frightened after I've been to confession. And see
I ve got a Breve here that a good father, who came to
mto preaching this Easter, blessed and gave us all "
Here Tessa drew from her bosom a tinv bag carefullv
fastened up. -And I think the holy Madonna will take
care ot me; she looks as if she would; and perhaps if I
wasn t idle, she wouldn't let me be beaten. '^

'' If they are so cruel to you, Tessa, shouldn't you like
to leave them, and go and live with a beautiful lady who

Tessa seemed to hold her breath for a moment or two
ihen she said doubtfully, ''I don't know."

^' Then should you like to be my little servant, and live
with me? said Tito, smiling. He meant no more than
to see what sort of pretty look and answer she would give

ihere was a flush of joy immediately. "Will you take
nie with you now? Ah! I shouldn't go home and be beaten
^ T.^ .^ P^"^^^ '^ ^^^^^® ^^"le, and then added more
doubtfully, "But I should like to fetch my black-faced

''Yes, you must go back to your kid, my Tessa," said
iito, rising, " and I must go the other way.''

r,"i^^/lP^*®^-" ^® ^^^Q^, as he went from under the
shade of the tree, " it is not a pleasant time of day to walk
from here to the Via de Bardi; I am more inclined to lie
down and sleep in this shade."

It ended so. Tito had an unconquerable aversion to
anything unpleasant, even when an object very much loved
and desired was on the other side of it. He had risen
early; had waited; had seen sights, and had been already
walking m the sun: he was inclined for a siesta, and
inclined all the more because little Tessa was there, and
seemed to make the air softer. He lay down on the grass
again, putting his cap under his head on a green tuft
by the side of Tessa. That was not quite comfortable; so
he moved again, and asked Tessa to let him rest his head
against her lap; and in that way he soon fell asleep. Tessa
sat quiet as a dove on its nest, just venturing, when he
was fast asleep, to touch the wonderful dark curls that fell
backward from his ear. She was too happy to go to sleep-
too happy to think that Tito would wake up, and that
then he would leave her, and she must go home. It takes

108 ROMOLA.

very little water to make a perfect pool for a tiny fish,
where it will find its world and paradise all in one, and
never have a presentiment of the dry bank. The fretted
summer shade and stillness, and the gentle breathing
of some loved life near — it would be a paradise to us all, if
eager thought, the strong angel with the implacable brow,
had not long since closed the gates.

It really was a long while before the waking came —
before the long dark eyes (^^ened at Tessa, first with
a little surprise, and then with a smile, which was soon
quenched by some preoccupying thought. Tito's deeper
sleep had broken into a doze, in which he felt himself
in the Via de Bardi, explaining his failure to appear
at the appointed time. The clear images of that doze
nrged him to start ujd at once to a sitting posture, and as he
stretched his arms and shook his cap, he said —

" Tessa, little one, you have let me sleep too long. My
hunger and the shadows together tell me that the sun has
done much travel since I fell asleep. I must lose no more
time. Addio," he ended; patting her cheek with one
hand and settling his cap with the other.

She said nothing, but there were signs in her face which
made him speak again in as serious and as chiding a tone
as he could command —

" Now, Tessa, you must not cry. I shall be angry; I
shall not love you if you cry. You must go home to your
black-faced kid, or if you like you may go back to the
gate and see the horses start. But I can stay with you no
longer, and if you cry I shall think you are troublesome
to me."

The rising tears were checked by terror at this change
in Tito's voice. Tessa turned very pale, and sat in trem-
bling silence, with her blue eyes widened by arrested tears.

"Look now," Tito went on soothingly, opening the
wallet tliat hung at his belt, "here is a pretty charm tliat
I have had a long while — ever since I was in Sicily,
a country a long way off."

His wallet had many little matters in it mingled with
small coins, and he had the usual difficulty in laying his
finger on the right thing. He unhooked his wallet, and
turned out the contents on Tessa's lap. Among them was
liis onyx ring.

"Ah, my ring! " he exclaimed, slipj)ing it on the fore-
finger of his right hand. " I forgot to put it on again this
morning. Strange, I never missed it! See, Tessa," he

UNDER THE PLAXE-TREE. 109

added, as he spread oat the smaller articles, and selected
the one he was in search of. "See this ]3retty little
pointed bit of red coral — like your goat's horn, is it not? —
and here is a hole in it, so you can put it on the cord round
your neck along with your Breve, and then the evil spirits
can't hurt you: if you ever see them coming in the shadow
round the corner, point this little coral horn at them, and
they will run away. It is a ' buona fortuna,' and will keep
you from harm when I am not with you. Come, undo
the cord."

Tessa obeyed, with a tranquilising sense that life was
going to be something quite new, and that Tito would be
with her often. All who remember their childhood
remember the strange, vague sense, when some new experi-
ence came, that everything else was going to be changed,
and that there would be no lapse into the old monotony.
So the bit of coral was hung beside the tinv bag with the
scrap of scrawled parchment in it, and Tessa felt braver.
''And now you will give me a kiss," said Tito, econo-
mising time by speaking, while he swept in the contents
of the wallet and hung it at his waist again, " and look

happy, like a good girl, and then "

But Tessa had obediently put forward her lips in a
moment, and kissed his cheek as he hung down his head.
"Oh, you pretty pigeonl" cried Tito, laughing, press-
ing her round cheeks with his hands and crushing her feat-
ures together so as to give them a general impartial kiss.

Then he started up and walked away, not looking round
till he was ten yards from her, when "^he just turned and
gave a parting beck. Tessa was looking after him, but he
could see that she was making no signs of distress. It was
enough for Tito if she did not cry while he was present.
The softness of his nature required that all sorrow should
be hidden away from him.

"I wonder when Eomola will kiss my cheek in that
way?" thought Tito, as he walked along. It seemed a
tiresome distance now, and he almost wished he had not
been so soft-hearted, or so tempted to linger in the shade.
Xo other excuse was needed to Bardo and Eomola than
saying simply that he had been unexpectedly hindered; he
felt confident their jproud delicacy would inquire no farther.
He lost no time in getting to Ognissanti, and hastily
taking some food there, he crossed the Arno by the Ponte
alia Carraja, and made his way as directly as possible
toAvard the Via de Bardi.

110 ROMOLA.

But it was the hour when all the world who meant to be
in particularly good time to see the Corso were returning
from the Borglii, or villages just outside the gates, where
they had dined and reposed themselves; and the thorough-
fares leading to the bridges were of course the issues
toward which the stream of sightseers tended. Just as
Tito reached the Ponte Vecchio and the entrance of the
Via de Bardi, he was suddenly urged back toward the
angle of the intersecting streets. A company on horse-
back, coming from the Via Guicciardini, and turning up
the Via de Bardi, had compelled the foot-passengers to
recede hurriedly. Tito had been walking, as his manner
was, with the thumb of his right hand resting in his belt;
and as he was thus forced to pause, and was looking care-
lessly at the passing cavaliers, he felt a very thin, cold
hand laid on his. He started round, and saw the Domini-
can friar whose upturned face had so struck him in the
morning. Seen closer, the face looked more evidently
worn by sickness and not by age; and again it brought
some strong but indefinite reminiscences to Tito.

"Pardon me, but — from your face and your ring," —
said the friar, in a faint voice, "is not your name Tito
Melema?"

"Yes," said Tito, also speaking faintly, doubly jarred
by the cold touch and the mystery. He was not apprehen-
sive or timid through his imagination, but through his sen-
sations and perceptions he could easily be made to shrink
and turn pale like a maiden.

"Then I shall fulfill my commission."

The friar put his hand under his scapulary, and draw-
ing out a small linen bag which hung round his neck, took
from it a bit of parchment, doubled and stuck firmly
together witli some black adhesive substance, and placed
it in Tito's hand. On the outside was written in Italian,
in a small but distinct character —

" Tito Melema, aged twenty -three, with a dark, heautifiil
face, long darJc curls, the hrightest smile, and a large onyx
ring on his right forefinger."

Tito did not look at the friar, but tremblingly broke
open the bit of parchment. Inside, the words were —

"/ am sold for a slave: I think they are going to taJce
me to Antioch. The gems alone toill serve to ransom me."

Tito looked round at the friar, but could only ask a
question with his eyes.

"I had it at Corinth," the friar said, speaking with

TITO's DILEMMA. Ill

difficulty, like oue whose small strength had been over-
taxed— "I had it from a man who was dying."

"He is dead, then?" said Tito, with a bounding of the
heart.

" N^ot the writer. The man who gave it to me was a pil-
grim, like myself, to whom the writer had intrusted it,
because he was journeying to Italy."

" You know the contents?"

"1 do not know them, but I conjecture them. Your
friend is in slavery: you will go and release him. But I
am unable to talk now." The friar, whose voice had
become feebler and feebler, sank down on the stone bench
against the wall from which he had risen to touch Tito^s
hand, adding —

" I am at San Marco; my name is Fra Luca."

CHAPTEK XI.

TITO's DILEMMA.

When Fra Luca had ceased to speak, Tito still stood by
him in irresolution, and it was not till, the pressure of the
passengers being removed, the friar rose and walked slowly
into the church of Santa Felicita, that Tito also went on
his way along the Via de Bardi.

" If this monk is a Florentine," said he to himself ; '' if
he is going to remain at Florence, everything must be dis-
closed." He felt that a new crisis had come, but he was
not, for all that, too evidently agitated to pay his visit
to Bardo, and apologize for his previous non-ai)pearance.
Tito's talent for concealment was being fast developed into
something less neutral. It was still possible — perhaps it
might be inevitable — for him to accept frankly the altered
conditions, and avow Baldassarre's existence; but hardly
without casting an unpleasant light backward on his orig-
inal reticence as studied equivocation in order to avoid tlie
fulfillment of a secretly recognized claim, to say nothing
of his quiet settlement of himself and investment of his
florins, when, it would be clear, his benefactor's fate had
not been certified. It was at least provisionally wise to act
as if nothing had happened, and for the present he would
suspend decisive thought; there was all the night for med-

113 ROMOLA.

itation, and no one would know the precise moment at
which he had received the letter.

So he entered the room on the second story — where
Eomola and her father sat among the parchment and
marble, aloof from the life of the streets on holidays as
well as on common days — with a face only a little less
bright than usual, from regret at appearing so late: a regret
which wanted no testimony, since he had given up the
sight of the Corso in order to express it ; and then set
himself to throw extra animation into the evening, though
all the while his consciousness was at work like a machine
with complex action, leaving deposits quite distinct from
the line of talk; and l)y the time he descended the stone
stairs and issued from the grim door in the starlight, his
mind had really reached a new stage in its formation of a
jmrpose.

And when, the next day, after he was free from his pro-
fessional work, he turned up the Via del Cocomero toward
tlie convent of San Marco, his purpose was fully shaped.
He was going to ascertain from Fra Luca precisely how
much he conjectured of the truth, and on what grounds
he conjectured it; and, further, how long he was to remain
at San Marco. And on that fuller knowledge he hoped to
mould a statement which would in any case save him
from the necessity of quitting Florence. Tito had never
had occasion to fabricate an ingenious lie before: the
occasion was come now — the occasion which circumstance
never fails to beget on tacit falsity; and his ingenuity was
ready. For he had convinced himself that he was not
bound to go in search of Baldassarre. He had once said
that on a fair assurance of his father's existence and
whereabouts, he would unhesitatingly go after him. But,
after all, why was he bound to go? What, looked at closely,
was the end of all life, but to extract the utmost sum of
pleasure? And was not his own blooming life a promise of
incomparably more pleasure, not for himself only, but for
others, than the withered wintry life of a man who was
past the time of keen enjoyment, and whose ideas liad
stiffened into barren rigidity? Those ideas had all been
sown in the fresh soil of Tito's mind, and were lively
germs there: that was the proper order of things — the
order of nature, which treats all maturity as a mere nidus
for youth. Baldassarre had done his work, had had his
draught of life: Tito said it Avas his turn now.

And the prospect was so vague: — "1 think they are

TITO'S DILEMMA. 113

going to take me to Antioch:" here was a vista! After a
long voyage, to spend months, perhaps years, in a search
for which even now there was no guarantee that it would
not prove vain: and to leave behind at starting a life of
distinction and love: and to find, if he found anything,
the old exacting companionship which was known by rote
beforehand. Certainly the gems and therefore the florins
were, in a sense, Baldassarre's: in the narrow sense by
which the right of possession is determined in ordinary
affairs; but in that large and more radically natural view
by which the world belongs to youth and strength, they
were rather his who could extract the most pleasure out of
them. That, he was conscious, was not the sentiment
which the complicated play of human feelings had engen-
dered in society. The men around him would expect that
he should immediately apply those florins to his benefac-
tor's rescue. But what was the sentiment of society? — a
mere tangle of anomalous traditions and opinions, which
no wise man would take as a guide, except so far as his
own comfort was concerned. Not that he cared for the
florins save perhaps for Romola's sake: he would give up
the florins readily enough. It was the joy that was due to
him and was close to his lips, which he felt he was not
bound to thrust away from him and so travel on, thirsting.
Any maxims that required a man to fling away the good
that was needed to make existence sweet, were only the
lining of human selfishness turned outward: they were
made by men who wanted others to sacrifice themselves for
their sake. He would rather that Baldassarre should not
suffer: he liked no one to suffer; but could any philosophy
prove to him that he was bound to care for another's suf-
fering more than for his own? To do so he must have
loved Baldassarre devotedly, and he did 7iot love him: was
that his own fault? Gratitude! seen closely, it made no
valid claim: his father's life would have been dreary with-
out him: are we convicted of a debt to men for the pleas-
ures they give themselves?

Having once begun to explain away Baldassarre's claim,
Tito's thought showed itself as active as a virulent acid,
eating its rapid way through all the tissues of sentiment.
His mind was destitute of that dread which has been erro-
neously decried as if it were nothing higher than a man's
animal care for his own skin: that awe of the Divine Nem-
esis whicli was felt by religious pagans, and, though it took
a moi-e positive form under Christianity, is still felt by the

114 KOMOLA.

mass of mankind simply as a vague fear at anything which
is called wrong doing. Such terror of the unseen is so far
above mere sensual cowardice that it will annihilate that
cowardice: it is the initial recognition of a moral law
restraining desire, and checks the hard bold scrutiny of
imperfect thought into obligations which can never be
proved to have any sanctity in the absence of feeling. " It
is good," sing the old Eumenides, in ^schylus, "that fear
should sit as the guardian of the soul, forcing it into wis-
dom— good that men should carry a threatening shadow in
their hearts under the full sunshine; else, how should they
learn to revere the right?" That guardianship may
become needless; but only when all outward law has
became needless — only when duty and love have united in
one stream and made a common force.

As Tito entered the outer cloister of San Marco, and
inquired for Fra Luca, there was no shadowy presentiment
in his mind: he felt himself too cultured and sceptical for
that: he had been nurtured in contempt for the tales of
priests whose impudent lives were a proverb, and in erudite
familiarity Avith disputes concerning the Chief Good, which
had after all, he considered, left it a matter of taste. Yet
fear was a strong element in Tito's nature — the fear of
what he believed or saw was likely to rob him of pleasure:
and he had a definite fear that Fra Luca might be the
means of driving him from Florence.

''Fra Luca? ah, he is gone to Fiesole — to the Domini-
can monastery there. He was taken on a litter in the cool
of the morning. The poor brother is very ill. Could you
leave a message for him?"

This answer was given by -a fra converso, or lay brother,
whose accent told plainly tliat'he was a raw contadino, and
whose dull glance implied no curiosity.

"Thanks; my business can wait."

Tito turned awav with a sense of relief. "This friar is
not likely to live," he said to himself. "I saw he was
worn to a shadow. And at Fiesole there will be nothing
to recall me to his mind. Besides, if he should come back,
my explanation will serve as well then as now. But I wish
I knew Avhat it was that his face recalled to me."

THE PRIZE IS NEAKLl GRASPED. 115

CHAPTER XII.

THE PRIZE IS NEARLY GRASPED.

Tito walked along with a light step, for the immediate
fear had vanished; the usual joyousness of his disposition
reassumed its predominance., and he was going to see
Romola. Yet Romola's life seemed an image of that
loving, pitying devotedness, that patient endurance of irk-
some tasks, from which he had shrunk and excused him-
self. But he was not out of love with goodness, or pre-
pared to plunge into vice: he was in his fresh youth, with
soft pulses for all charm and loveliness; he had still a
healthy appetite for ordinary human joys, and the poison
could only work by degrees. He had sold himself to evil,
but at present life seemed so nearly the same to him
that he was not conscious of the bond. He meant all
things to go on as they had done before, both within and
without him: he meant to win golden opinions by meri-
torious exertion, by ingenious learning, by amiable com-
pliance: he was not going to do anything that would
throw him out of harmony with the beings he cared for.
And he cared supremely for Romola; he wished to have
her for his beautiful and loving wife. There might be a
wealthier alliance within the ultimate reach of successful
accomplishments like his, but there was no woman in all
Florence like Romola. When she was near him, and
looked at him with her sincere hazel eyes, he was subdued
by a delicious influence as strong and inevitable as those
musical vibrations which take possession of us with a
rhythmic empire that no sooner ceases than we desire it to
begin again.

As he trod the stone stairs, when he was still outside the
door, with no one but Maso near him, the influence seemed
to liave begun its work by the mere nearness of anticipation.

"Welcome, Tito mio," said the old man's voice, before
Tito had spoken. There was a new vigor in the voice, a
new cheerfulness in the blind face, since that first inter-
view more than two months ago. " You have brought
fresh manuscript, doubtless; but since we were talking last
night I have had new ideas: we must take a wider scope —
we must go back upon our footsteps."

Tito, paying his homage to Romola as he advanced.

116 EOilOLA.

went, as his custom was, straight to Bardo's chair, and put
his hand in the palm that was held to receive it, placing
himself on the cross-legged leather seat with scrolled ends,
close to Bardo's elbow.

"Yes," he said, in his gentle way; " I have brought the
new manuscript, but that can wait your pleasure. I have
young limbs, you know, and can walk back up the liill
without any difficulty."

He did not look at Romola as he said this, but he knew
quite well that her eyes were fixed on him with delight.

" That is well said, my son." Bardo had already
addressed Tito in this way once or twice of late. ''And I
perceive with gladness that you do not shrink from labor,
without which, the poet has wisely said, life has given
nothing to mortals. It is too often the ' palma sine pul-
vere,' the j)rize of glory without the dust of the race, that
attracts young ambition. But what says the Greek? 'In
the morning of life, work; in the raid-day, give counsel;
in the evening, pray.' It is true, I might be thought to
have reached that helpless evening; but not so, while I
have counsel within me which is 3'et unsi^okeu. For my
mind, as I have often said, was shut up as by a dam; the
plenteous waters lay dark and motionless; but you, my
Tito, have opened a duct for them, and they rush forward
with a force that surprises myself. And now, what I
want is, that we should go over our preliminary ground
again, with a wider scheme of comment and illustration:
otherwise I may lose opportunities which I now see retro-
spectively, and which may never occur again. You mark
Avhat I am sayiug, Tito?"

He had just stooped to reach his manuscript, which had
rolled down, and Bardo's jealous ear was alive to the slight
movement.

Tito might have been excused for shrugging his shoul-
ders at the prospect before him, but he was not naturally
impatient; moreover, he had been bred up in that labor-
ious erudition, at once minute and copious, wliich Avas the
chief intellectual task of the age; and with Romola near,
he was floated along by waves of agreeable sensation that
made everything seem easy.

"Assuredly," he said, "you wish to enlarge your com-
ments on certain passages we have cited.

"Not only so; I wish to introduce an occasional excursus,
where we have noticed an author to whom I have given
special study; for I may die too soon to achieve any sepa-

THE PRIZE IS NEARLY GRASPED. 117

rate worlc. And this is not a time for scholarly integrity
and well-sifted learning to lie idle, when it is not only
rash ignorance that we have to fear, but when there are
men like Calderino, who, as Poliziano has well shown,
have recourse to imprudent falsities of citation to serve
the ends of their vanity and secure a triumph to their own
mistakes. AVherefore, my Tito, I think it not well that
we should let sli^j the occasion that lies under our hands.
And now we will turn back to the point where we have
cited the passage from Thncydides, and I wish you, by
way of preliminary, to go with me through all my notes
on the Latin translation made by Lorenzo Valla, for which
the incomparable Pope Nicholas Y. — with whose personal
notice I was honored while I was yet young, and when he
was still Thomas of Sarzana — paid him (I say not unduly)
the sum of five hundred gold scudi. But inasmuch as
Valla, though otherwise of dubious fame, is held in
high honor for his severe scholarship, whence the epigram-
matist has jocosely said of him that since he went among
the shades, Piuto himself has not dared to speak in the
ancient languages, it is the more needful that his name
should not be as a stamp warranting false wares; and
therefore I would introduce an excursus on Thucydides,
wherein my castigations of Valla^s text may find a fitting
place. My Romola, thou wilt reach the needful vol-
umes— thou knowest them — on the fifth shelf of the
cabinet."

Tito rose at the same moment with Romola, saying, '^I
will reach them, if you will point them out out," and fol-
lowed her hastily into the adjoining small room, where the
walls were also covered with ranges of books in perfect
order.

"There they are," said Romola, pointing upward;
"every book is just where it was when my father ceased to
see them."

Tito stood by her without hastening to reach the books.
They had never been in this room together before.

"I hope," she continued, turning her eyes full on Tito,
with a look of grave confidence — " I hope he will not
weary you; this work makes him so happ}'."

"And me too, Romola — if you will only let me say, I
love you — if you will only think me worth loving a little."

His speech was the softest murmur, and the dark beau-
tiful face, nearer to hers than than it had ever l^een before,
was looking at her with beseeching tenderness.

118 ROMOLA.

''I do love yon/' murmured Eomola; she looked at him
with the same simple majesty as ever, but her voice had
never in her life before sunk to that murmur. It seemed
to them both that they were looking at each other a long
while before her lips moved again; yet it was but a moment
till she said, '' I know noiv what it is to be happy."

The faces Just met, and the dark curls mingled for an
instant with the rippling gold. Quick as lightning after
that Tito set his foot on a projecting ledge of the book-
shelves, and reached down the needful volumes. They
were both contented to be silent and separate, for that first
blissful experience of mutual consciousness was all the
more exquisite for being unperturbed by immediate sen-
sation.

It had all been as rapid as the irreversible mingling of
waters, for even the eager and jealous Bardo had not
become impatient.

"You have the volumes, my Romola?'" the old man
said, as they came near him again. "And now you will
get your pen ready; for, as Tito marks off the scholia we
determine on extracting, it Avill be well for you to copy
them without delay — numbering them carefully, mind, to
correspond with the numbers in the text which he will
write. "

Eomola always had some task which gave her a share in
this joint work. Tito took his stand at the leggio, where
he both wrote and read, and she placed herself at a table
just in front of him, where she was ready to give into her
father's hands anything that he might happen to Avant, or
relieve him of a volume that he had done with. They had
always been in that position since the work began, yet on
this day it seemed new; it was so different now for them
to be opposite each other; so different for Tito to take a
l)ook from her, as she lifted it from her father's knee. Yet
there was no finesse to secure an additional look or
touch. Each woman creates in her own likeness the love-
tokens that are offered to her; and Romola's deep calm
happiness encompassed Tito like the rich but quiet evening
light which dissipates all unrest.

They had been two hours at their work, and were just
desisting because of the fading light, when the door opened
and there entered a figure strangely incongruous with the
current of their thoughts and with the suggestions of
every object around them. It was the figure of a short
stout black-eyed woman, about fifty, wearing a black

THE PKIZE IS NEARLY GRASPED. 119

velvet berretta, or close cap, embroidered with pearls,
under which surprisingly massive black braids surmounted
the little bulging forehead, and fell in rich plaited curves
over the ears, while an equally surprising carmine tint on
the upper region of the fat cheeks contrasted with the sur-
rounding sallowness. Three rows of pearls and a lower
necklace of gold reposed on the horizontal cushion of
her neck; the embroidered border of her trailing black-
velvet gown and her embroidered long-drooping sleeves
of rose-colored damask, were slightly faded, but they
conveyed to the initiated eye the satisfactory assurance
that they were the sj^lendid result of six months' labor
by a skilled workman: and the rose-colored petticoat,
with its dimmed white fringe and seed-pearl arabesques,
was duly exhibited in order to suggest a similar pleasing
reflection. A handsome coral rosary hung from one side
of an inferential belt, which emerged into certainty with a
large clasp of silver wrought in niello; and, on the other
side, where the belt again became inferential, hung a
scarsella, or large purse, of crimson velvet, stitched with
pearls. Her little fat right hand, which looked as if it had
been made of paste, and had risen out of shape under
partial baking, held a small book of devotions, also splendid
with velvet, j^earls, and silver.

The figure was already too familiar to Tito to be start-
ling, for Monna Brigida was a frequent visitor at Bardo's,
being excejDted from the sentence of banishment passed on
feminine triviality, on the ground of her cousinship to his
dead wife and her early care for Eomola, who now looked
round at her with an affectionate smile, and rose to draw
the leather seat to a due distance from her father's chair,
that the coming gush of talk might not be too near his
ear.

'•' La cugina?" said Bardo, interrogatively, detecting the
short steps and the sweeping drapery.

" Yes, it is your cousin,'' said Monna Brigida, in an
alert voice, raising her fingers smilingly at Tito, and then
lifting up her face to be kissed by Eomola. ''Always the
troublesome cousin breaking in on your wisdom," she went
on, seating herself and beginning to fan herself with the
whiteveil hanging over her arm. ""Well, well; if I didn't
bring you some news of the world now and then, I do
believe 3'ou'd forget there was anything in life but these
mouldy ancients, who want sp]'inkliug with holy water, if all
I hear about them is true. Xot but what the'world is bad

120 ROMOLA.

enough nowadays, for the scandals that turn np nnder one's
nose at every corner — / don't want to hear and see such
things, but one can't go about with one's head in a bag;
and it was only yesterday — well, well, you needn't burst
out at me, Bardo, I'm not going to tell anything; if I'm
not as wise as the three kings, I know how many legs go
into one boot. But, nevertheless, Florence is a wicked
city — is it not true, Messer Tito? for you go into the
world. Not but what one must sin a little — Messer Domen-
eddio expects that of us, else what are the blessed sacra-
ments for? And what I say is, we've got to reverence the
saints, and not to set ourselves up as if we could be like
them, else life would be unbearable; as it will be if things
go on after this new fashion. For what do you think? I've
been at the wedding to-day — Dianora Acciajoli's with the
young Albizzi that there has been so much talk of — and
everybody wondered at its being to-day instead of yester-
day; but, cieli! such a wedding as it was might have been
put off till the next Quaresima for a penance. For there
was the bride looking like a white nun — not so much as a
pearl about her — and the bridegroom as solemn as San
Giuseppe. It's true! And half the people invited Avere
Piagnoni — they call them Piagnoni* now, these new
saints of Fra Girolamo's making. And to tliink of two
families like the Albizzi and the Acciajoli taking uj) such
notions, when they could afford to wear the best! Well,
well, they invited me — but tliey could do no other, seeing
my husband was Luca Antonio's uncle by the mother's
side — and a pretty time I had of it while we waited under
the canopy in front of the house, before they let us in. I
couldn't stand in my clothes, it seemed, without giving
offense; for there was Monna Berta, who has had Avorse
secrets in her time than any I could tell of myself, looking
askance at me from under her hood like a pinzochera f and
telling me to read the Frate's book about widows, from
which she had found great guidance. Holy Madonna ! it
seems as if widows had nothing to do now but to buy their
coffins, and think it a thousand years until they get into
them, instead of enjoying themselves a little when they've
got their hands free for the first time. And what do you
think was the music we had, to make our dinner lively? A
long discourse from Fra Domenico of San Marco, about
the doctrines of their blessed Fra Girolamo — the three
doctrines we arc all to get by heart; and he kept marking
* Funeiiil mouruers : properly, paid mourners.

THE PRIZE IS NEAELY GRASPED. 121

them off on his fingers till he made my flesh creep: and
the first IS, Florence, or the Church— I don't know which,
for first he said one and then the other— shall be scourged;
but if he means the pestilence, the Signory ought to put
a stop to such preaching, for it's enough toVaise the swell-
mg under one's arms with fright: but then, after that, lie
says Florence is to be regenerated; but what will be the
good of that Avhen we're all dead of the plague, or some-
thing else ? And then, the third thing, and what he said
oftenest, is, that it's all to be in our days: and he marked
that off on his thumb, till he made me tremble like the
very jelly before me. They had jellies, to be sure, with
the arms of the Albizzi and the Acciajoli raised on them
m all colors; they've not turned the world quite upside
down yet. But all their talk is, that we are to go back to
the old ways: for up starts Francesco Yalori. that I've
danced with in the Via Laiga when he was a baclielor and
as fond of the Medici as anybody, and he makes a speech
about the old times, before "the Florentines had left off
crymg 'Popolo' and begun to cry 'Palle'— as if that had
anythmg to do with a wedding ! — and how we ought to
keep to the rules the Signory laid down heaven knows when,
that we were not to wear this and that, and not to eat this
and that — and how our manners were corrupted, and we

read bad books; though he can't say that of me "

"Stop, cousinl" said Bardo, in his imperious tone, for
he had a remark to make, and only desperate measures
could arrest the rattling lengthiness of Monna Brigida's
discourse. But now she gave a little start, pursed up her
mouth, and looked at him with round eyes.

" Francesco Valori is not altogether wrong," Bardo went
on. "Bernardo, indeed, rates him not highly, and is
rather of opinion that he christians private grudges by the
name of public zeal; though I must admit that my good
Bernardo is too slow of belief in that unalloyed patriotism
which was found in all its lustre amongst" the ancients.
But it is true, Tito, that our manners have degenerated
somewhat from that noble frugality which, as haslbeen well
seen in the public acts of our citizens, as the parent of true
magnificence. For men, as I hear, will now spend on the
transient show of a Giostra, sums which would suffice to
found a library, and confer a lasting possession on man-
kind. Still, I conceive, it remains true of us Florentines
that we have more of that magnanimous sobriety which

■h A Sister of the Third Order of St. Friincis : an uiicloistered mm.

122 ROMOLA.

abhors a trivial lavishness that it may be grandly open-
handed on grand occasions, than can be found in any other
city of Italy; for I understand that the Neapolitan and
Milanese courtiers laugh at the scarcity of our plate, and
think scorn of our great families for borrowing from each
other that furniture of the table at their entertainments.
But in the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its
applause. "

''Laughter, indeed!" burst forth Monna Brigida again,
the moment I3ardo paused. " If anybody wanted to hear
laughter at the wedding to-day they were disappointed, for
when 3"oung Niccolo Macchiavelli tried to make a joke,
and told stories out of Franco Sacchetti's book, how it was
no use for the Signoria to make rules for us women,
because we were cleverer than all the painters, and archi-
tects, and doctors of logic in the world, for we could make
black look white, and yelloAV look pink, and crooked look
straight, and, if anything was forbidden, we could find a
new name for it — Holy Virgin! the Pagnoni looked more
dismal than before, and somebody said Sacchetti's book
was wicked. Well, I don't read it — they can't accuse we
of reading anything. Save me from going to a wedding
again, if that's to be the fashion; for all of us who were
not Piagnoni were as comfortable as wet chickens. I was
never caught in a worse trap but once before, and that was
when I went to hear their precious Frate last Quaresima in
San Lorenzo. Perhaps I never told you about it, Messer
Tito? — it almost freezes my blood when I think of it.
How he rated us poor women! and the men, too, to tell
the truth, but I didn't mind that so much. He called us
cows, and lumps of flesh, and wantons, and mischief-
makers — and I could just bear that, for there were plenty
others more fleshy and spiteful than I was, though every
now and then his voice shook the very bench under me like
a trumpet; but then he came to the false hair, and 0, mis-
ericordia! he made a picture — I see it now — of a young
woman lying a pale corpse, and us light-minded widows — of
course he meant me as well as the rest, for I had my plaits
on, for if one is getting old, one doesn't want to look ugly
as the befana, * — us widows rushing up to the corpse, like
bare-pated vultures as we were, and cutting ofl' its young
dead hair to deck our old heads with. Oh, the dreams I
had after that! And then he cried, and wrung his hands

* The name given \o the grotesque black-faced figures, supposed to repre-
sent the Majri, carriod ahoiit or placed in the windows on Twelfth Night: a
corruptiuii of Epifania.

THE PRIZE IS NEARLY GRASl'ED. 123

ut US, and I cried too. And to go home, and to take off
my jewels, this very clasp, and everything, and to make
them into a packet, fh fiiN'tftiu; and I was within a hair
of sending them to the Good Men of St. Martin to give
to the poor, but, by heaven's mercy, I bethought me of
going first to my confessor, Fra Oristoforo, at Santa Croce,
and he told me how it was all the work of the devil, this
preaching and prophesying of their Fra Girolamo, and the
Dominicans were trying to turn the world upside down, and
I was never to go and hear him again, else I must do pen-
ance for it; for the great preachers Fra Mariana and Fra
Menico had shown how Fra Girolamo preached lies — and
that was true, for I heard them both in the Duomo — and
how the Pope's dream of San Francesco propping up the
Church with his arms were being fulfilled still, and the
Dominicans were beginning to pull it down. AVell and
good, I went away co7i Dio, and made myself easy. I am
not going to be frightened by a Frate Predicatore again.
And all I say is, 1 wish it hadn't been the Dominicans that
poor Dino joined years ago, for then I should have been
glad when I heard them say he was come back "

" Silenziol" said Bardo, in a loud agitated voice, while
llomola half started from her chair, clasped her hands, and
looked round at Tito, as if now she might appeal to him.
Monna Brigida gave a little scream, and bit her lip.

"Donna!" said Bardo, again, " hear once more my will.
Bring no reports about that name to this house; and tlion,
liomola, I forbid thee to ask. My son is dead."

Bardo's whole frame seemed vibrating with passion, and
no one dared to break silence again. Monna Brigida lifted
her shoulders and her hands in mate dismay; then she
rose as quietly as possible, gave many significant nods to
Tito and Romola, motioning to them that they were not
to move, and stole but of the room like a culpable fat
spaniel who had barked unseasonably.

Meanwhile, Tito's quick mind had been combining
ideas with lightning-like rapidity. Bardo's son was not
really dead, then, as he had supposed: he was a monk;
he was "come back:" and Fra Luca — yes! it was the
likeness to Bardo and Romola that had made the face
seem half-known to him. If he were only dead at
Fiesole at that moment! This importunate selfish wish
inevitably thrust itself before every other thought. It was
true thai Bardo's rigid will was a sufficient safeguard
against any intercourse between liomola and her brother;

12-i ROMOLA,

but not against the betra3^al of what he knew to others,
especially when the subject was suggested by the coupling
of Romola's name with that of tlie very Tito Melema whose
description he had carried round his neck as an index.
No! nothing but Fra Luca's death could remove all
danger; but his deatli was highly probable, and after the
momentary shock of the discovery, Tito let his mind fall
back in repose on that confident hope.

They had sat in silence, and in a deepening twilight for
many minutes, when Romola ventured to say —

" Shall I light the lamp, father, and shall we go on?"

" No, my Romola, we will work no more to-night.
Tito, come and sit by me here."

Tito moved from tlie reading-desk, and seated himself
on the other side of Bardo, close to his left elbow.

"• Come nearer to me, figliuola mia," said Bardo again,
after a moment's pause. And Romola seated herself on a
low stool and let her arm rest on her father's right knee,
that he might lay his hand on her hair, as he was fond of
doing.

"Tito, I never told you tliat I had once a son,'' said
Bardo, forgetting what had fallen from him in the emotion
raised by their first interview. The old man had been
deeply shaken, and was forced to pour out his feelings in
spite of pride. "But he left me — he is dead to me.
I have disowned him forever. He was a ready scholar as
you are, but more fervid and impatient, and yet sometimes
rapt and self-absorbed, like a flame fed by some fitful
source; showing a disposition from the very first to turn
away his eyes from the clear lights of reason and philoso-
phy, and to prostrate himself under the influences of a
dim mysticism which eludes all rules of human duty as it
eludes all argument. And so it ended. We will speak no
more of him: he is dead to me. I wish his face could be
blotted from that world of memory in which the distant
seems to grow clearer and the near to fade."

Bardo paused, but neither Romola nor Tito dared to
speak — his voice was too tremulous, the poise of his feel-
ings too doubtful. But he presently raised his hand and
found Tito's shoulder to rest it on, while he went on speak-
ing, with an effort to be calmer.

"But ynv have come to me, Tito — not quite too late.
T will lose no time in vain regret. When you are working
by my i-idc 1 seem to havr found a son again."

The old man, preoccupied with the governing interest

THE PRIZE IS NEARLY (iliASPED. 125

of his life, was oiih' tliinkiug of the much-meditated book
whicli had quite thrust into the background the suggestion,
raised by Bernardo del Xero's warning, of a possible mar-
riage between Tito and Eomola. But Tito could not allow
the moment to pass unused.

''Will you let me be always and altogether your son?
Will you let me take care of Romola — be her husband?
I think she will not deny me: She has said she loves me.
I know I am not equal to her in birth — in anything; but I
am no longer a destitute stranger."

"Is it true, my Romola?" said Bardo, in a lower tone,
an evident vibration passing through him and dissipating
the sudden aspect of his features.

''Yes, father," said Romola, firmly. " I love Tito — I
wish to marry him, that we may both be your children
and never part."

Tito's hand met hers in a strong clasp for the first time,
while she was speaking, but their eyes were fixed anxiously
on her father.

'•' Wliy should it not be so?" said Bardo, as if arguing
against any ojiposition to his assent, rather than assenting.
''It would be a happiness to me; and thou, too, Romola,
wouldst be the happier for it."

He stroked her long hair gently and bent toward her.

"Ah, I have been apt to forget that thou needest some
other love than mine. And thou wilt be a noble wife.
Bernardo thinks I shall hardly find a husband fitting for
thee. And he is perhaps right. For thou art not like the
herd of thy sex: thou art such a woman as the immortal
poets had a vision of when they sang the lives of the
heroes — tender but strong, like thy voice, which has been

to me instead of the light in the years of my blindness

And so thou lovest him?"

He sat upright again for a minute, and then said, in the
same tone as before, "Why should it not be? I will think
of it; I will take with Bernardo."

Tito felt a disagreeable chill at this answer, for Bernardo
del Xero's eyes had retained their keen suspicion whenever
they looked at him, and the uneasy remembrance of Fra
Luca converted all uncertainty into fear.

" Speak for me, Romola," he said, pleadingly. " Messer
Bernardo is sure to be against me."

"Xo, Tito." said Romola, "my godfather will not
oppose what my father firmly wills. And it is your will
that I should marry Tito — is it not true, father? Xothing

126 KOMOLA.

lias ever come to me before that I have wished for strongly:
I did not think it possible that I could care so much for
anything that could happen to myself."

It was a brief and simple plea; but it was the condensed
story of Romola^s self-repressing colorless young life,
which had thrown all its passion into sympathy with aged
sorrows, aged ambition, aged pride and indignation. It
had never occurred to Romola that she should not speak
as directly and emphatically of her love for Tito as of any
other subject.

" Eomola mia!" said her father fondly, pausing on the
words, " it is true thou hast never urged on me any wishes
of thy own. And I have no will to resist thine; rather,
my heart met Tito's entreaty at its very first utterance.
Nevertheless, I must talk with Bernardo about the meas-
ures needful to be observed. For we must not act in
haste, or do anything unbeseeming my name. I am poor,
and held of little account by the wealthy of our family —
nay, I may consider myself a lonely man — but I must never-
theless remember that generous birth has its obligations.
And I would not be reproached by my fellow-citizens for
rash haste in bestowing my daughter. Bartolommeo Scala
gave his Alessandra to the Greek Marullo, but Marullo's
lineage was well known, and Scala himself is of no extrac-
tion. I know Bernardo will hold that we must take
time: he will, perhaps, reproach me with a want of due
forethought. Be patient my children: you are very young."

No more could be said, and Eomola's heart was perfectly
satisfied. Not so Tito's. If the subtle mixture of good
and evil prepares suffering for human truth and purity,
there is also suffering prepared for the wrong-doer by the
same mingled conditions. As Tito kissed Eomola on their
parting that evening, the very strength of the thrill that
moved his whole being at the sense that this woman, Avhose
beauty it was hardly possible to tliink of as anything but
the necessary consequence of her noble nature, loved him
, with all the tenderness that spoke in her clear eyes, brought
a strong reaction of regret that he not kept liimself free
from that first deceit which had dragged him into the
danger of being disgraced before her. There was a spring
of bitterness mingling with that fountain of sweets.
Would the death of Fra Luca arrest it? He hoped it
would.

THE SHADOW OF XEMESIS. 127

CHAPTER XIII.

THE SHADOW OF NEMESIS.

It was the lazy afternoon time on the seventh of Sep-
tember, more than two months after the day on which
Romola and Tito had confessed their love to each other.

Tito, just descended into Nello's shop, had found the
Larber stretched on the bench with his cap over his eyes;
one leg was drawn up, and the other had slipped toward
the ground, having apparently carried with it a manuscript
volume of verse, which lay with its leaves crushed. In a
corner sat Sandro, playing a game at mora by himself, and
watch mg the slow reply of his left fingers to the arithmet-
ical demands of his right with solemn-eyed interest.

Treading with the gentlest step, Tito snatched up the
lute, and bending over the barber, touched the strings
lightly while he sang. —

" Quant' h bella giovinezza,
Che si f ug-g-e tuttaAia!
Chi \-u<3l esser lieto sia,
Di doman non c'e certezza."*

Nello was as easily awaked as a bird. The cap was off
his eyes in an instant, and he started up.

''Ah, my Apollino! I am somewhat late with my siesta
on this hot day, it seems. That comes of not going to
sleep m the natural way, but taking a potion of potent
poesy. Hear you, how I am beginning to match my words
by the initial letter, like a Trovatore? That is one of my
bad symptoms: I am sorely afraid that the good wine of
my understanding is going to run off at the spigot of
authorship, and I shall be left an empty cask with an odor
of dregs, like many another incomparable genius of my
acquaintance. What is it, my Orpheus?" here Nello
stretched out his arms to their full length, and then
brought them round till his hands grasped Tito's curls, and
drew them out playfully. '' What is it you want of your
well-tamed Nello? For I perceive a coaxing sound in that
soft strain of yours. Let me see the very needle's eye of
your desire, as the sublime poet says, that I may thread it."

* " Beauteous is life in blossom!
And it fleeteth— fleeteth ever;
Whoso would be joj-ful— let him!
There's no surety for the morrow."

—Varniml Sonn by Lorenzo de Mediei.

128 KOMOLA.

" That is but a tailor's image of your sublime poet's,"
said Tito, still letting his fingers fall in a light dropping
v/ay on the strings. "But you have divined the reason of
my affectionate impatience to see your eyes open. I want
you to give me an extra toacli of your art — not on my chin,
no; but on the zazzera, which is as tangled as your Floren-
tine politics. You have an adroit way of inserting your
comb, which flatters the skin, and stirs the animal spirits
agreeably in that region; and a little of your most delicate
orange-scent would not be amiss, for I am bound to the
Scala palace, and am to present myself in radiant company.
The young Cardinal Giovanni de Medici is to be there, and
he brings with him a certain young Bernardo Dovizi of
Bibbiena, whose wit is so raj^id that I see no way of outri-
valing it save by the scent of orange-blossoms."

Nello had already seized and flourished his comb, and
pushed Tito gently backward into the chair, wrapping the
cloth round him.

"Never talk of rivalry, bel giovane mio: Bernardo
Dovizi is a keen youngster, who will never carry a net out
to catch the wind; but he has something of the same
sharp-muzzled look as his brother Ser Piero, the weasel
that Pierode Medici keeps at his beck to slip through small
holes for him. No! you distance all rivals, and may soon
touch thesky with your forefinger. They tell me you
have even carried enough honey with you to sv/eeten the
sour Messer Angelo; for he has pronounced j^ou less of an
ass than might have been expected, considering there is
such a goodunderstanding between you and the Secretary."

"And between ourselves, Nello mio, that Messer Angelo
has more genius and erudition than I can find in all the
other Florentine scholars put together. It may answer
very well for them to cry me up now, when Poliziano is
beaten down with grief, or illness, or something else; I
can try a flight with such a sparrow-hawk as Pietro Crinito,
i)ut for Poliziano, he is a large-beaked eagle who would
swallow me, feathers and all, and not feel any difference."

"1 will not contradict your modesty there, if you will
liave it so; but you don't expect us clever Florentines to
keep saying the same things over again every day of our
lives, as we must do if we always told the truth. We cry
down Dante, and we cry up Francesco Cei, just for the
sake of variety; and if we cry you up as a new Poliziano,
heaven has taken care that it shall not be quite so great a
lie as it might have been. And are you not a pattern of

THE SHADOW OF NEMESIS. 129

virtue in this wicked city? with your ears double-waxed
against all siren invitations that would lure you from
the Via de Bardi, and the great work which is to astonish
posterity?"

" Posterity in good truth, whom it will probably astonish
as the universe does, by the impossibility of seeing what
was the plan of it."

"Yes, something like that was being prophesied here
the other day. Cristoforo Landino said that the excellent >
Bardo was one of those scholars who lie overthrown in^
their learning, like cavaliers in heavy armor, and then
get angry because they are over-ridden — which pithy
remark, it seems to me, was not an herb out of his own
garden; for of all men, for feeding one with an empty
spoon and gagging one with vain expectation by long dis-
course, Messer Christoforo is the pearl. Eccol you are
perfect now." Here Xello drew away the cloth. "' Impos-
sible to add a grace morel But love is not always to be
fed on learning, eh? I shall have to dress the zazzera for
the betrothal before long — is it not true?""

"Perhaps," said Tito, smiling, "unless Messer Ber-
nardo should next recommend Bardo to require that I
should yoke a lion and a wild boar to the car of the
Zecca before I can win my Alcestis. But I confess he is
right in holding me unworthy of Romola; she is a Pleiad
that may grow dim by marrying any mortal."

"Giiaffe, your modesty is in the right place there. Yet
fate seems to have measured and cliiseled you for the
niche that was left empty by the old man's son, who, by
the way, Cronaca was telling me, is now at San Marco.
Did you know?"'

A slight electric shock passed through Tito as he rose
from the chair, but it was not outwardly perceptible, for
he immediately stooped to pick up the fallen book, and
busied his fingers with flattening the leaves, while he
said —

"No; he was at Fiesole, I thought. Are you sure he
is come back to San Marco?"

"Cronaca is my authority," said Nello, with a shrug.
"I don't frequent that sanctuary, but he does. Ah," he
added, taking the book from Tito's hands, "my poor
Xencia da Barberino! It jars your scholarly feelings to
see the pages dog's-eared. I was lulled to sleep by the
well-rhymed charms of that rustic maiden — 'prettier
than the turnip-flower,' 'with a cheek more savory than
9

130 ROMOLA.

cheese.' But to get such a well-scented notion of the
contadiua, one must lie on velvet cushions in the Via
Larga — not go to look at the Fierucoloni stumping into
the Piazza della Nunziata this evening after sundown."

"And pray who are the Fierucoloni?" said Tito, indif-
ferently, settling his caj).

"The contadine who came from the mountains of
Pistoia, and the Casentino, and heaven knows where, to
keep their vigil in the church of the Nunziata, and sell
their yarn and dried mushrooms at the Fierucola,* as" we
call it. They make a queer show, with their paper
lanterns, howling their hymns to the Virgin on this eve
of her nativity — if you had the leisure to see them.
No? — well, I have had enough of it myself, for there is
wild work in the Piazza. One may happen to get a stone
or two about one's ears or shins without asking for it, and
I was never fond of that pressing attention. Addio."

Tito carried a little uneasiness with him on his visit,
which ended earlier than he had expected, the boy-
cardinal Giovanni de Medici, youngest of red-hatted
fathers, who has since presented his broad dark cheek
very conspicuously to posterity as Pope Leo the Tenth,
having been detained at his favorite pastime of the cliase,
and having failed to appear. It still wanted half an hour
(jf sunset as he left the door of the Scala palace, with the
intention of proceeding forthwith to the Via de Bardi;
but he had not gone far when, to his astonishment, he
saw Eomola advancing toward him along the Borgo Pinti.

She wore a thick black veil and black mantle, but it
was impossible to mistake her figure and her walk; and
by her side was a short stout form, which he recognized as
that of Monna Brigida, in spite of the unusual plainness
of her attire. Eomola had not been bred up to devotional
observances, and the occasions on which she took the air
elsewhere than under the loggia on the roof of the house,
were so rare and so much dwelt on beforehand, because of
Bardo's dislike to be left without her, that Tito felt sure
there must have been some sudden and urgent ground for
an absence of which he had heard nothing the da}^ before.
She saw him through her veil and hastened her steps.

"Romola, has anything happened?" said Tito, turning
to walk by her side.

She did not answer at the first moment, and Monna
Brigida broke in.

*The little Fair.

THE SHADOW OF XEMESIS. 131

''Ah, Messer Tito, you do well to turn round, for we
are in haste. And is it not a misfortune? — we are obliged
to go round by the walls and turn up the Via del Maglio,
because of the fair; for the contadine coming in block up
the way by the Nunziata, which would have taken us to
San Marco in half the time."

Tito's heart gave a great bound, and began to beat
violently,

''Romola," he said, in a lower tone, '-'are you going to
San Marco?"

They were now out of the Borgo Piuti and were under
the city walls, where they had wide gardens on their left
hand, and all was quiet. Romola put aside her veil for
the sake of breathing the air, and he could see the subdued
agitation in her face.

''Yes, Tito mio," she said, looking directly at him with
sad eyes. ''For the first time I am doing something
uuknowni to my father. It comforts me that I have met
you, for at least I can tell you. But if you are going to
him, it vv'ill be well for you not to say that you met me.
He thinks I am only gone to my cousin, because she
sent for me. I left my godfather with him: he knows
where I am going, and why. You remember that evening
when my brother's name was mentioned and my father
spoke of him to you?"

"Yes;" said Tito, in a low tone. There was a strange
complication in his mental state. His heart sank at the
probability that a great change was coming over his pros-
pects, while at the same time his thoughts were darting
over a hundred details of the course he would take when
the change had come; and yet he returned Romola's gaze
with a hungry sense that It might be the last time she
would ever bend it on him with full unquestioning confi-
dence.

" The cugina had heard that he was come back, and the
evening before — the evening of San Giovanni — as I after-
wards found, he had been seen by our good Maso near the
door of our house; but when Maso went to inquire at San
Marco, Dino, that is, my brother — he was christened
Bernardino, after our godfather, but now he calls himself
Fra Luca — had been taken to the monastery at Fiesole,
because he was ill. But this morning a message came to
Maso, saying that he was come back to San Marco, and
Maso went to him there. He is very ill, and he has
adjured me to go and see him. I cannot refuse it, though

133 ROMOLA.

I hold liim guilty; I still remember how I loved him when
I was a little girl, before I knew that he would forsake my
father. And perhaps lie has some word of penitence to
send by me. It cost me a struggle to act in opposition to
my father's feeling, vrhich I have always held to be just.
I am almost sure you will think I have chosen rightly,
Tito, because I have noticed that your nature is less rigid
than mine, and nothing makes you angry: it would cost
you less to be forgiving; though, if you had seen your
father forsaken by one to whom he had given his chief
love — by one in whom he had planted his labor and his
hopes — forsaken when his need was becoming greatest —
even you, Tito, would find it hard to forgive."

What could he say? He was not equal to the hypocrisy
of telling Eomola that such offences ought not to be par-
doned; and he had not the courage to utter any words of
dissuasion.

"You are right, my Eomola; you are always right,
except in thinking too well of me."

There was really some genuinness in those last words,
and Tito looked very beautiful as he uttered them, with
an unusual pallor in his face, and a slight quivering of
his lip. Romola, interpreting all things largely, like a
mind prepossessed with high beliefs, had a tearful bright-
ness in her eyes as she looked at him, touched with keen
joy that he felt so strongly whatever she felt. But with-
out pausing in her walk, she said —

"And now, Tito, I wish you to leave me, for the cugina
and I shall be less noticed if we enter the piazza alone."

"Yes, it were better you should leave us," said Monna
Brigida; "for to say the truth, Messer Tito, all eyes
follow you, and let Romola muffle herself as she will, every
one wants to see what there is under her veil, for she has
that way of walking like a procession. Not that I find
fault with her for it, only it doesn't suit my steps. And,
indeed, I would rather not have us seen going to San
Marco, and that's why I am dressed as if I were one of the
Piagononi themselves, and as old as Sant Anna; for if it
had been anybody but poor Dino, who ought to be for-
given if he's dying, for what's the use of having a grudge
against dead people? — make them feel while they live, say
I "

No one made a scruple of interrupting Monna Brigida,
and Tito, having just raised Eomola's hand to his lips, and
said, "I understand, I obey you/' now turned away, lift-

THE SHADOW OF XEMESIS. 133

ing his cap — a sign of reverence rarelj^ made at that time
by native Florentines, and which excited Bernardo del
Zero's contempt for Tito as a fawning Greek, while to
Romola, who loved homage, it gave him an exceptional
grace.

He was half glad of the dismissal, half disposed to cling
to Romola to the last moment in which she would love
him without suspicion. For it seemed to him certain that
this brother would before all things want to know, and
that Romola would before all things confide to him, what
was her father's position and her own after the years which
must have brought so much change. She would tell him
that she was soon to be publicly betrothed to a young
scholar, who was to fill up the place left vacant long ago
by a wandering son. He foresaw the impulse that would
prompt Romola to dwell on that prospect, and what would
follow on the mention of the future husband's name. Fra
Luca would tell all he knew and conjectured, and Tito
saw no possible falsity by which he could now ward off the
worst consequences of his former dissimulation. It was
all over with his prospects in Florence. There was Messer
Bernardo del Nero, who would be delighted at seeing con-
firmed the v.'isdom of his advice about deferring the
betrothal until Tito's character and position had been
established by a longer residence; and the history of the
young (Ireek professor, whose benefactor was in slavery,
would be the talk under every loggia. For the first time
in his life he felt too fevered and agitated to trust his
power of self-command; he gave up his intended A'isit to
Bardo, and walked up and down under the walls until the
yellow liglit in the west had quite faded, when, without
any distinct purpose, he took the first turning, which hap-
pened to be the Via San Sebastiano, leading him directly
toward the Piazza del' Annunziata.

He was at one of those lawless moments which come to
us all if we have no guide but desire, and if the pathway
where desire leads us seems suddenly closed; he was ready
to follow any beckoning that offered him an immediate
purpose.

134 KOMOLA.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE peasants' FAIR.

The moving crowd ;ind the strange mixture of noises
that burst on him at the entrance of the piazza, reminded
Tito of what Nello had said to him about tlie Fierucohjni,
and he pushed his way into the crowd with a sort of
pleasure in the hooting and elbowing, which filled the
empty moments, and dulled that calculation of the future
which had so new a dreariness for him, as he foresaw him-
self wandering away solitary in purs\iit of some unknown
fortune, that his thoughts had even glanced toward going
in search of Baldassarre after all.

At each of the opposite inlets he saw people struggling
into the piazza, while above them paper lanterns, held
aloft on sticks, were Avaving uncertainly to and fro. A
rude monotonous chant made a distinctly traceable strand
of noise, across which screams, whistles, gibing chants in
piping boyish voices, the beating of drums, and the ringing
of little bells, met each other in confused din. Every now
and then one of the dim floating lights disapj^eared with a
smash from a stone launched more or less vaguely in pur-
suit of mischief, followed by a scream and renewed shouts.
But on the outskirts of the whirling tumult there were
groups who were keeping this vigil of the Nativity of the
Virgin in a more methodical manner than by fitful stone-
throwing and gibing. Certain ragged men, darting a hard
sharp glance around them, while their tongues rattled
merrily, were inviting country people to game with them
on fair and open-lianded terms; two masquerading figures
on stilts, who had snatched lanterns from the crowd, were
SAvayiug the lights to and fro in meteoric fashion, as they
strode hither and thither; a sage trader was doing a profit-
able business at a small covered stall, in hot herUngozzi, a
favorite farinaceous delicacy; one man standing on a barrel,
with his back firmly planted against a pillar of the loggia
in front of the Foundling Hospital (Spedale degl' Inuo-
centi), was selling efficacious pills, invented by a doctor of
Lalerno, warranted to ju'event toothache and death by
drowning: and not far off, against another pillar, a tumbler
was showing off his tricks on a small platform; while a
handful of 'prentices, desinsing the slack entertainment of
guerilla stone-throwmg; were having a private concentrated

THE peasants' FAIR. 135

match of that favorite Florentine sport at the narrow
entrance of the Via de Febbrai.

Tito, obliged to make his way through chance openings
in the crowd, found himself at one moment close to the
trotting procession of barefooted, hardheeled contadine,
and cuuld see their sun-dried, bronzed faces, and their
strange, fragmentary garb, dim with hereditary dirt, and
of obsolete stuffs and fashions, that made them look, in
the eyes of the city people, like a way-worn ancestry
returning from a pilgrimage on which they had set out
a century ago. Just then it was the hardy, scant-feeding
peasant-women from the mountains of Pistoia, who were
.entering with a year's labor in a moderate bundle of yarn
on their backs, and in their hearts that meagre hope of
good and that wide dim fear of harm, which were some-
how to be cared for by the Blessed Virgin, whose miracu-
lous image, painted by the angels, was to have the curtain
drawn away from it on this Eve of her Xativity, that its
potency might stream forth without obstruction.

At another moment he was forced away towards the
boundary of the piazza, where the more stationary candi-
dates for attention and small coin had judiciously placed
themselves, in order to be safe in their rear. Among these
Tito recognised liis acquaintance Bratti, who stood with his
back against a pillar and his mouth ])ursed up in disdainful
silence, eyeing every one who approached him with a cold
glance of superiority, and keeping his liand fast on a
serge covering which concealed the contents of the basket
slung before him. Rather surprised at a deportment so
unusual in an anxious trader, Tito went nearer and saw
two women go up to Bratti's basket with a look of curi-
osity, whereupon the pedlar drew the covering tigliter,
and looked another way. It was quite too provoking, and
one of the women was fain to ask what there was in his
basket ?

''Before I answer that, Monna, I must know whether
you mean to buy. I can't show such wares as mine in
this fair for every fly to settle on and pay nothing. My
goods are a little too choice for that. Besides, I've only
two left, and I've no mind to sell them; for with the
chances of the pestilence that wise men talk of, there is
likelihood of their being worth their weight in gold. No,
no: andate co7i Dio."

The two women looked at each other.

''And what may be the price?'' said the second.

136 EOMOLA,

"Not within what you are likely to have in your purse,
buona donna," said Bratti in a compassionately super-
cilious tone. "I recommend you to trust in Messer
Domeneddio and the saints: poor people can do no better
for themselves."

"Not so poor!" said the second woman, indignantly,
drawing out her money-bag. " Come, now! " wliat do you
say to a grosso?"

" I say you may get twenty-one quattrini for it," said
Bratti, coolly; "but not of me, for I haven't got that
small change."

"Come; two, then?" said the woman, getting exasper-
ated, while her companion looked at her with some envy.
"It will hardly be above two, I think."

After further bidding, and further mercantile coquetry,
Bratti put on an air of concession.

" Since you've set your mind on it," he said, slowly rising
the cover, " I should be loth to do you a mischief; for
Maestro Gabbadeo used to say, when a woman sets her
mind on a thing and doesn't get it, she's in worse danger
of the pestilence than before. Ecco! I have but two left;
and let me tell you, the fellow to them is on the JSnger of
Maestro Gabbadeo, who is gone to Bologna — as wise a
doctor as sits at any door."

The precious objects were two clumsy iron rings, beaten
into the fashion of old Roman rings, such as were some-
times disinterred. The rust on them, and the entirely
hidden character of their potency were so satisfactory that
tlie grossi were paid without grumbling, and the first
woman, destitute of those handsome coins, succeeded, after
much show of reluctance on Bratti's part, in driving a
bargain with some of her yarn, and carried off the remain-
ing ring in triumph. Bratti covered up his basket, which
was now filled with miscellanies, probably obtained under
the same sort of circumstances as the yarn, and, moving
from the pillar, came suddenly upon Tito, who, if he had
time, would have chosen to avoid recognition.

" By the head of San Giovanni, now," said Bratti, draw-
ing Tito back to the pillar, " this is a piece of luck. For
I was talking of you this morning, Messer Greco; but, I
said, he is mounted up among the signori now — and I'm
glad of it, for I was at the bottom of his fortune — but I
can rarely get speech of him, for he's not to be caught
lying on the stones now — not he! But it's your luck, not

THE PEASANTS* FAIR. 137

mine, Messer Greco, save and except some small trifle to
satisfy me for my trouble in the transaction."

" You speak in riddles, Bratti," said Tito. " Remember
1 don t sharpen my wits, as you do, by driving hard bar-
gams for iron rings: you must be plain.''

''By the Holv 'Vangels! it was an easy bargain I gave
tiiem. If a Hebrew gets thirty-two per cent, I hope a
Christian may get a little more. If I had not borne a
conscience, I should have got twice the money and twice
the money and twice the yarn. But, talking of rings it
is your ring— that very ring you've got on vour finger-
that I could get you a purchaser for; aye, and a purchaser
with a deep money-bag."

"Tmly?" said Tito, looking at his ring and listening.
A benoese who is going straight away into Hungary
as i unaerstand. He came and looked all over my shop
to see if I had any old things I didn't know the price of •
1 warrant you, he thought I had a pumpkin on my
shoulders. He had been rummaging all the shops in
-blorence. And he had a ring on— not like vours, but
something of the same fashion; and as he was" talking of
rings, I said I knew a fine voung man, a particular
acquaintance of mine, who had a ring of that sort And
he said, 'Who is he, pray? Tell him I'll give him his
jDi-ice for it. And I thought of going after you to Nello's
to-morrow; for it's my opinion of you, Messer Greco, that
you re not one who'd see the Arno run broth, and stand
by without dipping your finger."

Tito had lost no word of what Bratti had said, yet his
mmd had been very busy all the while. Why should he
keep the ring? It had been a mere sentiment, a mere
fancy, that had prevented him from selling it with the
other gems; if he had been wiser and had sold it he
might perhaps have escaped that identification by Fra Luca
it was true that it had been taken from Baldassarre's
linger and put on his own as soon as his young hand had
grown to the needful size; but there was really no valid
good to anybody m those superstitious scruples about
inanimate objects. The ring had helped toward the
recognition of him. Tito had begun to dislike recogni-

^S"' ^?l° ^ ^^^ ^ °^^^°^ ^^^^ *he past. This foreigner's
oiler, if he would really give a good price, was an oppor-
tunity lor getting rid of the ring without the trouble of
seeking a purchaser.

"You speak with your usual wisdom, Bratti," said Tito.

138 KOMOLA.

'•'I have no objection to liear wliat your Genoese Avill offer.
But when and where shall I have speech of him?"

"To-morrow, at three hours after sunrise, he Avill be at
my shop, and if your wits are of that sharpness I have
always taken them to be, Messer Greco, you will ask him
a heavy price; for he minds not money. It's my belief
he's buying for somebody else, and not for himself — per-
haps for some great signor."

''It is well, said Tito. "I will be at your shop, if
nothing hinders."

"And you will doubtless deal nobly by me for old
acquaintance' sake, Messer Greco, so I will not stay to fix
the small sum yon will give me in token of my service in
the matter. It seems to me a thousand years now till I
get out of the piazza, for a fair is a dull, not to say a
wicked thing, when one has no more goods to sell."

Tito made a hasty sign of assent and adieu, and moving
away from the pillar, again found himself pushed toward
the middle of the piazza and back again, without the
power of determining his own course. la this zigzag way
he was carried along to the end of the piazza opj)osite the
churcli, where, in a deep recess formed by an irregularity
in the line of houses, an entertainment was going forward
which seemed to be especially attractive to the crowd.
Loud bursts of laughter interrupted a monologue which
was sometimes slow and oratorical, at others rattling and
buffoouish. Here a girl was being pushed forward into the
inner circle with apparent reluctance, and there a loud
laughing minx was finding a way with her own elbows. It
was a strange light tliat was spread over the piazza. There
were the pale stars breaking out above, and the dim waving
lanterns below, leaving all objects indistinct except when
they were seen close under the fitfully moving lights; but
in this recess there was a stronger light, against which the
heads of the encircling spectators stood in dark relief as
Tito Avas gradually pushed toward them, while above them
rose the head of a man Avearing a white mitre with yellow
cabalistic figures upon it.

"Behold, my ehildreni" Tito heard him saying, " behold
your opportunity! neglect not the holy sacrament of mat-
rimony when it can be had for the small sum of a white
quattrino — the cheapest matrimony ever oifered, and dis-
solved by special bull beforehand at every man's own will
and pleasure. Behold the bull I" Here the speaker held
up a piece of j)archment with huge seals attached to it.

THE peasants" fair. 139

"Behold the iudulgence granted by his Holiness Alexan-
der the Sixth, who, being newly elected Pope for his pecu-
liar piety, intends to reform and purify the Church, and
wisely begins by abolishing that priestly abuse which keeps
too large a share of this privileged matrimony to the
clergy and stints the laity. Spit once, my sons, and pay
a white quattrino! This is the whole and sole price of the
indulgence. The quattrino is the only difference the Holy
Father allows to be put any longer between us and the
clergy — who spit and pay nothing."

Tito thought he knew the voice, which had a peculiarly
sharp ring, but the face was too much in shadow from the
lights behind for him to be sure of the features. Stepping
at near as he could, lie saw within the circle behind the
speaker an altar-like table raised on a small platform, and
covered with a red drapery stitched all over with yellow
cabalistical figures. Half-a-dozen thin tapers burned at
the back of this table, which liad a conjuring apparatus
scattered over it, a large open book in the centre, and at
one of the front angles a monkey fastened by a cord to a
small ring and liolding a small taper, which in his incessant
fidgety movements fell more or less aslant, whilst an impish
boy in a white surplice occupied himself chiefly in cuffing
the monkey, and adjusting the taper. The man in the
mitre also wore a surplice, and over it a chasuble on which
the signs of the zodiac were rudely marked in black upon
a yellow ground. Tito was sure now that he recognized
the sharp upward-tending angles of the face under the
mitre: it was that of Maestro Yaiano, the mountebank,
from whom he had rescued Tessa! .Pretty little Tessa!
Perhaps she too had come in among the troops of contadine.

''Come, my maidens! This is the time for the pretty
who can have many chances, and for the ill-favored who
have few. Matrimony to be had — hot, eaten, and done
with as easily as berlingozzi! And see!" here the conjurer
help up a cluster of tiny bags. "To every bride I give a
Breve with a secret in it — the secret alone v/orth the

money you pay for the matrimony. The secret how to

no, no, I will not tell you what the secret is about, and
that makes it a double secret. Hang it round your neck
if you like, and never look at it; I don't say that will not
be the best, for then you will see many things you don't
expect: though if you open it you may break your leg,
e vero, but you will know a secret! Something nobody
knows but me! And mark — I give you the Breve, I don't

140 BOMOLA.

sell it, as many another holy man would: the quattrino is
for the matrimony, and the Breve you get for nothing.
Orsii, giovanetti, come like dutiful sons of the Church and
buy the Indulgence of his Holiness Alexander the Sixth."

This buffoonery just fitted the taste of the audience;
the fierucola was but a small occasion, so the townsmen
might be contented with jokes that were rather less inde-
cent than those they were accustomed to hear at every car-
nival, put into easy rhyme by the Magnifico and his poetic
satellites; while the women, over and above any relish of
the fun, really began to have an itch for the Brevi. Sev-
eral couples had already gone through the ceremony, in
which the conjurer's solemn gibberish and grimaces over
the open book, the antics of the monkey, and even the
preliminary spitting, had called forth peals of laughter;
and now a well-looking, merry-eyed youth of seventeen,
in a loose tunic and red cap, pushed forward, holding by
the hand a plum brunette, whose scanty ragged dress dis-
played her round arms and legs very picturesquely.

"Fetter us without delay, Maestro!" said the youth,
''for I have got to take my bride home and paint her
under the light of a lantern."

"Ha! Mariotto, my son, I commend your pious observ-
ance " The conjurer was going on, when a loud chat-
tering behind warned him that an unpleasant crisis had
arisen with his monkey.

The temper of that imperfect acolyth was a little tried
by the over-active discipline of his colleague in the sur-
plice, and a sudden cuff administered as his taper fell to a
horizontal position, caused him to leap back with a vio-
lence that proved too much for the slackened knot by
which his cord was fastened. His first leap was to the
other end of the table, from which position his remon-
strances were so threatening that the imp in the surplice
took up a wand by way of an equivalent threat, whereupon
the monkey leaped on to the head of a tall woman in the
foreground, dropping his taper by the way, and chattering
with increased emphasis from that eminence. Great was
the screaming and confusion, not a few of the spectators
having a vague dread of the Maestro's monkey, as capable
of more hidden mischief than mere teeth and claws could
inflict; and the conjurer himself was in some alarm lest
any harm should happen to his familiar. In the scuffle to
seize the monkey's string, Tito got out of the circle, and,
not caring to contend for his place again, he allowed him-

THE PEASAIs'TS" FAIR. 141

self to be gradually pushed toward the church of the Nun-
ziata, and to enter among the worshi2:)ers.

The brilliant illumination within seemed to press upon
his eyes with palpable force after the pale shattered lights
and broad shadows of the piazza, and for the first minute
or two he could see nothing distinctly. That yellow
splendor was in itself something supernatural and heavenly
to many of the peasant-women, for whom half the sky was
hidden by mountains, and who went to bed in the twilight;
and the uninterrupted chant from the choir was repose to
the ear after the hellish hubbub of the crowd outside.
Gradually the scene became clearer, though still there was'
a thin yellow haze from incense mingling with the breath
of the multitude. In a chapel on the left hand of the nave,
wreathed with silver lamps, was seen unveiled the miracu-
lous fresco of the Annunciation, which, in Tito's oblique
view of it from the right-hand side of the nave, seemed
dark with the excess of light around it. The whole area of
the great church was filled with peasant-women, some
kneeling, some standing; the coarse, bronze skins, and
the dmgy clothing of the rougher dwellers on the mount-
ams, contrasting with the softer-lined faces and white or
red head-drapery of the well-to-do dwellers in the valley,
who were scattered in irregular groups. And spreading
high and far over the walls and ceiling there was another
multitude, also pressing close against each other, that they
might be nearer the potent Virgin. It was the crowd
of votive waxen images, the effigies of great person-
ages, clothed in their habit as they lived: Florentines
of high name in their black silk lucco, as when they
sat m council; popes, emperors, kings, cardinals, and
famous condottieri with plumed morion seated on their
chargers; all notable strangers who passed through Florence
or had aught to do with its affairs — Mohammedans, even,
m well-tolerated companionship with Christian cavaliers;
some of them with faces blackened and robes tattered by
the corroding breath of centuries, others fresh and bright
m new_ red mantle or steel corselet, the exact doubles of
the living. And wedged in with all these were detached
arms, legs, and other members, with only here and there a
gap where some image had been removed for public dis-
grace, or had fallen ominously, as Lorenzo's had done six
months before. It was a perfect resurrection swarm of
remote mortals and fragments of mortals, reflecting, in

142 ROMOLA.

their varying degrees of freshness, the sombre dinginess
and sprinkled brightness of the crowd below.

Tito's glance wandered over the wild multitude in search
of something. He had already thought of Tessa, and the
white hoods suggested the possibility that he might detect
her face under one of them. It was at least a thought to
be courted, rather than the vision of Eomola looking at
him with changed eyes. But he searched in vain; and he
Avas leaving the church, weary of a scene which had no
variety, when, just against the doorway, he caught sight of
Tessa, only two yards off him. She was kneeling with her
back against the wall, behind a group of peasant-women,
who were standing and looking for a spot nearer to the
sacred image. Her head hung a little aside with a look of
weariness, and her blue eyes were directed rather absently
toward an altar-piece where the Archangel Michael stood
in his armor, with young face and floating hair, amongst
•bearded and tonsured saints. Her right hand, holding a
bunch of cocoons, fell by her side listlessly, and her round
cheek was paled, either by the light or by the weariness
that was expressed in her attitude: her lips were pressed
poutingly together, and every now and then her eyelids
half fell. She was a large image of a sweet, sleepy child. Tito
felt an irresistible desire to go up to her and get her pretty
trusting looks and prattle: this creature who was without
moral judgment that could condemn him, whose little
loving ignorant soul made a world apart, where he might
feel in freedom from suspicions and exacting demands,
had a new attraction for him now. She seemed a refuge
from the threatened isolation that would come with dis-
grace. He glanced cautiously round, to assure himself
that Monna Ghita was not near, and then, slipping quietly
to her side, kneeled on one knee, and said, in the softest
voice, "Tessa!"

She hardly started, any more than she would have
started at a soft breeze that fanned her gently when she
was needing it. She turned her head and saw Tito's face
close to her: it was very much more beautiful than the
Archangel Michael's, who Avas so mighty and so good that
he lived with the Madonna and all the saints and was
prayed to along with them. She smiled in happy silence,
for that nearness of Tito quite filled her mind.

"My little Tessa I you look very tired. How long have
you been kneeling here?"

THE peasants' FAIR. 143

She seemed to be collecting her thoughts for a minute
or two, and at last she said —

"I'm very hungry.'^

''Come, then; come with me."

He lifted her from her knees, and led her out under
the cloisters surrounding the atrium, which were then
open, and not yet adorned with the frescos of Andrea del
Sarto.

" How is it you are all by yourself, and so hungry,
Tessa?''

"The Madre is ill; she has very bad pains in her legs,
and sent me to bring these cocoons to the Santissima
Nunziata, because they're so wonderful; see!" — she held
up the bunch of cocoons, which were arranged with fortu-
itous regularity on a stem, — "and she had kept them to
bring them herself, but she couldn't, so she sent me,
because she thinks the Holy Madonna may take away her
pains; and somebody took my bag with the bread and
chestnuts in it, and the people pushed me back, and I was
so frightened coming in the crowd, and I couldn't get
anywhere near the Holy Madonna, to give the cocoons to
the Padre, but I must — oh, I must."

"Yes, my little Tessa, you shall take them; but first
come and let me give you some berlingozzi. There are
some to be liad not far off."

"Where did you come from?" said Tessa, a little bewil-
dered. "I tliought you would never come to me again,
because you never came to the Mercato for milk any more.
I set myself Aves to say, to see if they would bring you
back, but I left off, because they didn't."

"You see I come when you want some one to take care
of you, Tessa. Perhaps the Aves fetched me, only it took
them a long while. But what shall you do if you are here
all alone? Where shall you go?"

"Oh, I shall stay and sleep in the church — a great many
of them do — in the church and all about here — I did oiice
when I came with my mother; and the patrigno is coming
with the mules in the morning."

They were out in the piazza now, where the crowd was
rather less riotous than before, and the lights were fewer,
the stream of pilgrims having ceased. Tessa clung fast to
Tito's arm in satisfied silence, while he led her toward the
stall where he remembered seeing the eatables. Their
way was the easier because there was just now a great rush
toward the middle of the piazza, where the masqued

144 ROMOLA.

figures on stilts had found space to execute a dance. It
was very pretty to see the guileless thing giving her cocoons
into Tito's hand, and then eating her berlingozzi with the
relish of a hungry child. Tito had really come to take
care of her, as he did before, and that wonderful happiness
of being with him had begun again for her. Her hunger
was soon appeased, all the sooner for the new stimulus of
happiness that had roused her from her languor, and, as
they turned away from the stall, she said nothing about
going iuto the church again, biit looked round as if the
sights m the piazza were not without attraction to her now
she was safe under Tito's arm.

"How can they do that?" she exclaimed, looking up at
the dancers on stilts. Then, after a minute's silence, "■ Do
you think Saint Christopher helps them?"

"Perhaps. What do you think about it, Tessa?" said
Tito, slipping his right arm round her, and looking down
at her fondly.

"Because Saint Christopher is so very tall; and he is
very good: if anybody looks at him he takes care of them
all day. He is on the wall of the church — too tall to stand
up there — but I saw him walking through the streets one
San Giovanni carrying the little Gesu."

" You pretty pigeon! Do you think anybody could help
taking care of you, if you looked at them?"

"Shall you always come and take care of me?" said
Tessa, turning her face up to him, as he crushed her cheek
with his left hand. "And shall you always be a long while
first?"

Tito was conscious that some bystanders Avere laughing
at them, and though the license of street fun, among
artists and young men of the wealthier sort as well as
among the populace, made few adventures exceptional,
still less disreputable, he chose to move away toward the end
of the piazza.

" Perhaps I shall come again to you very soon, Tessa,"
ho answered, rather dreamily, when they had moved away.
He was thinking that when all the rest had turned their
backs upon him, it would be pleasant to have this little
creature adoring him and nestling against him. The absence
of presumptuous self-conceit in Tito made him feel all
tlie more defenceless under prospective obloquy: he needed
soft looks and caresses too much ever to be impudent.

" In the Mercato?" said Tessa. " Not to-morrow morn-
ing, because the patriyno will be there, and he is so cross.

THE peasants' fair. 145

Oh! but you have money, and he will not be cross if you
buy some salad. And there are some chestnuts. Do you
like chestnuts?"

He said nothing, but continued to look down at her with
a dreamy gentleness, and Tessa felt herself in a state of
delicious wonder; everything seemed as new as if she were
being carried on a chariot of clouds.

" Holy Virgin ! " she exclaimed again presently. " There
is a holy father like the Bishop I saw at Prato."

Tito looked up too, and saw that he had unconsciously
advanced to within a few yards of the conjuror, Maestro
Vaiano, who for the moment was forsaken by the crowd.
His face was turned away from them, and he was occupied
with the apparatus on his altar or table, preparing a new
diversion by the time the interest in the dancing should
be exhausted. The monkey was imprisoned under the red
cloth, out of reach of mischief, and the youngster in the
white surplice was holding a sort of dish or salver, from
which his master was taking some ingredient. The altar-
like table, with its gorgeous cloth, the row of tapers, the
sham episcopal costume, the surpliced attendant, and even
the movements of the mitred figure, as he alternately bent
his head and then raised something before the lights, were
a sufficiently near j^arody of sacred things to rouse poor
little Tessa's veneration; and there was some additional
awe produced by the mystery of their apparition in this
spot, for when she had seen an altar in the street before, it
had been on Corpus Christi Day, and there had been a
procession to account for it. She crossed herself and
looked up at Tito, but then, as if she had had time for
reflection, said, "It is because of the Nativita."

Meanwhile Vaiano had turned round, raising his hands
to his mitre with the intention of changing his dress,
when his quick eye recognised Tito and Tessa, who were
both looking at him, their faces being shone upon by the
light of his tapers, while his own was in shadow,

'^Ha! my children!" he said, instantly, stretching out
his hands in a benedictory attitude, "you are come to be
married. I commend your penitence — the blessing of
Holy Church can never come too late."

But whilst he was speaking, he taken in the whole
meaning of Tessa's attitude and expression, and he dis-
cerned an opportunity for a new kind of joke which
required him to be cautious and solemn.

"Should you like to be married to me, Tessa?" said
10

ROMOLA.

Tito,, softly, half enjoying the comedy, as he saw the
pretty childish seriousness on her face, half prompted by
hazy previsions which belonged to the intoxication of
despair.

He felt her vibrating before she looked up at him and
said, timidly, " Will yo^i let me?"

He answered only by a smile, and by leading her forward
in front of the cerretano, who, seeing an excellent jest in
Tessa's evident delusion, assumed a surpassing sacredotal
solemnity, and went through the mimic ceremony with a
liberal expenditure of lingua fiirlesca or thieves' Latin.
But some symptoms of a new movement in the crowd
urged him to bring it to a sjDeedy conclusion and dismiss
them with hands outstretched in a benedictory attitude
over their kneeling figures. Tito, disposed always to cul-
tivate goodwill, though it might be the least select, put a
piece of four grossi into his hand as he moved away, and
was thanked by a look which the conjurer felt sure, con-
veyed a perfect understanding of the whole affair.

But Tito himself was very far from that understanding,
and did not, in fact, know Avhether, the next moment, he
should tell Tessa of the joke and laugh at her for a little
goose, or whether he should let her delusion last, and see
what would come of it — see what she would say and do
next.

" Then you will not go away from me again," said Tessa,
after they had walked a few steps, "and you will take me
to where you live." She spoke meditatively, and not in a
questioning tone. But presently she added, " I must go
back at once to the Madre though, to tell her I brought
the cocoons, and that I am married, and shall not go back
again."

Tito felt the necessity of speaking now; and in the
rajjid thought prompted 'by that necessity, he saw that by
undeceiving Tessa he should be robbing himself of some
at least of that pretty trustfulness Avhich might, by-and-liy,
be his only haven from contempt. It would spoil Tessa to
make her the least particle wiser or more suspicious.

"Yes, my little Tessa," he said caressingly, "you must
go back to^the Madre; but you must not tell her you are
married — you must keep that a secret from everybody: else
some very great harm would happen to me, and you would
never see me again."

She looked up at him with fear in her face.

"You must go back and feed your goats and mules, and

THE peasants' FAIR. 147

do just as 3'ou have always done before, and say no word
to any one about me."

The corners of her mouth fell a little.

"And then, perhaps, I shall come and take care of you
again when you want me, as I did before. But you must
do just what I tell you, else you will not see me again."

" Yes, I will, I will,'' she said, in a loud whisper,
frightened at that blank prospect.

They were silent a little while; and then Tessa, looking
at her hand, said —

"The Madre wears a betrothal ring. She went to
church and had it put on, and then after that, another
day, she was married. And so did the cousin Nannma.
But then she married Gollo," added the poor little thing,
entangled in the difficult comparison between her own case
and others within her experience.

"But you must not wear a betrothal ring, my Tessa,
because no one must know you are married," said Tito,
feeling some insistance necessary. "And the huona
fort una that I gave you did just as well for betrothal.
Some people are betrothed with rings and some are not."

" Yes, it is true, they would see the ring," said Tessa,
trying to convince herself that a thing she would like very
much was really not good for her.

The)' were now near the entrance of the church again,
and she remembered her cocoons which were still in Tito's
hand.

"Ah, you must give me the boto," she said; "and we
must go in, and I must take it to the Padre, and I must
tell the rest of my beads, because I was too tired before."

" Yes, you must go in, Tessa; but I will not go in.
I must leave you now," said Tito, too feverish and weary
to re-enter that stifling heat, and feeling that this was the
least difficult way of parting with her.

"And not come back? Oh, where do you go?" Tessa's
mind had never formed an image of his whereabout or his
doings when she did not see him: he had vanished, and
her thought, instead of following him, had stayed in the
same spot where he was with her.

"I shall come back some time, Tessa," said Tito, taking
her under the cloisters to the door of the church. "You
must not cry — you must go to sleep, when you have said
your beads. And here is money to buy your breakfast.
Now kiss me, and look happy, else I shall not come again."

She made a great effort over herself as she put up her

148 HOMOLA.

lips to kisa him, and submitted to be gently turned round,
with lier face toward the dour of the church. Tito saw
her enter; and then with a shrug at his own resolution,
leaned against a pillar, took otf his cap, rubbed his hair
backward, and wondered Avhere Romola was now, and
what she was thinking of him. Poor little Tessa had
disappeared behind the curtain among the crowd of peas-
ants; but the love which formed one w^eb with all his
worldly hopes, with the ambitions and pleasures that must
make the solid part of his days — the love that Avas identi-
fied with his larger self — was not to be banished from his
consciousness. Even to the man who presents the most
elastic resistance to whatever is unpleasant, there will
come moments when the pressure from without is too
strong for him, and he must feel the smart and the bruise
in spite of himself. Such a moment had come to Tito.^
There was no possible attitude of mind, no scheme of
action by which the uprooting of all his newly-planted
hopes could be made otherwise than painful.

CHAPTER XV.

THE DYING MESSAGE.

Wheist Romola arrived at the entrance of San Marco she
found one of the Frati waiting there in expectation of her
arrival. Monna Brigida retired into the adjoining church,
and Romola was conducted to the door of the chapter-
house in the outer cloister, whither the invalid had been
conveyed; no woman being allowed admission beyond this
precinct.

When the door opened, the subdued external light
blending with that of two tapers placed behind a truckle-
bed, showed the emaciated face of Era Luca, with the ton-
sured crown of golden hair above it, and with deep-sunken
hazel eyes fixed on a small crucifix which he held before
him. He was propped up into nearly a sitting posture;
and Romola was just conscious, as she threw aside her
veil, that there was another monk standing by the bed,
with the black cowl drawn over his head, and that he
moved toward the door as she entered; just conscious that
in the background there was a crucified form rising high

TlTF. DYJSG MESSAGE, 149

and pale on the frescoed wall, and pale faces of sorrow
lookiujj^ out from it below.

The next moment her eyes met Fra Luca's as they looked
up at her from the crucifix, and she was absorbed in that
pang of recognition which identified this monkish emaci-
ated form with the image of her fair young brother.

"Dinol" she said, in a voice like a low cry of pain.
But she did not bend toward him; she held herself erect,
and paused at two yards' distance from him. There was
an unconquerable repulsion for her in that monkish aspect;
it seemed to her the brand of the dastardly undutifulness
which had left her father desolate — of the groveling
superstition which could give such undutifulness the
name of piety. Her father, whose proud sincerity and
simplicity of life had made him one of the few frank
pagans of his time, had brought her up with a silent ignor-
ing of any claims the Church could have to regulate the
belief and action of beings with a cultivated reason. The
Church, in her mind, belonged to that actual life of the
mixed multitude from which they had always lived apart,
and she had no ideas that could render her brother's
course an object of any other feeling than incurious, indig-
nant contempt. Yet the lovingness of Romola's soul had
clung to that image in the past, and while she stood
rigidly aloof, there was a yearning search in her eyes for
something too faintly discernible.

But there was no corresponding emotion in the face of
the monk. He looked at the little sister returned to him
in her full womanly beauty, with the far-off gaze of a
revisiting spirit.

''My sister!" he said, with a feeble and interrupted but
yet distinct utterance, ''it is well thou hast not longer
delayed to come, for I have a message to deliver to thee,
aud my time is short."

Eomola took a step nearer: the message, she thought,
would be one of affectionate penitence to her father, and
lier heart began to open. Nothing could wipe out the
long years of desertion; but the culprit, looking back on
those years with the sense of irremediable wrong com-
mitted, would call forth pity. Now, at the last, there
would be understanding and forgiveness. Dino w^ould
pour out some natural filial feeling; he would ask ques-
tions about his father's blindness — how rapidly it had
come on? how the long dark days had been filled? w^hat
the life was now in the homo where he himself had been

150 ROMOLA.

iiourislie'd? — and the last message from the dying lijis
would be one of tenderness and regret.

"Romola," Fra Luca began, ''I have had a vision
concerning thee. Thrice I have had it in the last two
months: each time it has been clearer. Therefore I came
from Fiesole, deeming it a message from heaven that I
was bound to deliver. And I gather a promise of mercy
to thee inthis, that my breath is preserved in order to — "

The difficult breathing which continually interrupted
him would not let him finish the sentence,

Komola had felt her heart chilling again. It was a
vision, then, this message — one of those visions she had
so often heard her father allude to Avith bitterness. Her
indignation rushed to her lips.

"Dino, I thought you liad some words to send to my
father. You forsook him when his sight was failing; you
made his life very desolate. Have you never cared about
that? never repented? What is this religion of yours,
that places visions before natural duties?"

The deep-sunken hazel eyes turned slowly toward her,
and rested upon her in silence for some moments, as if he
were meditating whether he should answer her,

"No," he said at last; speaking, as before, in a low,
passionless tone, as of some spirit not human, speaking
through dying human organs, "IN^o; I have never re-
pented fleeing from the stifling poison-breath of sin that
was hot and thick around me, and threatened to steal
over my senses like besotting wine. My father could not
hear the voice that called mc night and day; he knew
nothing of the demon-tempters that tried to drag me
back from following it. My father has lived amidst
human sin and misery without believing in them: he has
been like one busy picking shining stones in a mine, while
there was a world dying of plague above him, I spoke,
but he listened with scorn, I told him the studies he
wished me to live for were either childish trifling — dead
toys — or else they must be made warm and living by
pulses that beat to worldly ambitions and fleshly lusts, for
worldly ambitions and fleshly lusts made all the substance
of the poetry and history he wanted me to bend my eyes
on continually."

"Has not my father led a pure and noble life, then?''
Romola burst forth, unable to hear in silence this implied
accusation against her father. "He has sought no
worldly honors; he has been truthful; he has denied him-

THE DYIXG -MESSAGE. 151

self all luxuries; he has liA'ed like one of the ancient
sages. He never wished you to live for worldly ambitions
and fleshly lusts; he wished you to live as he himself has
done, according to the jnirest maxims of philosophy, in
Avhich he brought you up."

Eomola spoke partly by rote, as all ardent and symim-
thetic young creatures do; but she spoke with intense
belief. The pink flush was in her face, and she quivered
from head to foot. Her brother was again slow to answer;
looking at her passionate face with strange passionless
eyes.

"WhatAvere the maxims of philosophy to me? They
told me to be strong when I felt myself weak; when I was
ready, like the blessed Saint Benedict, to roll myself
among thorns, and court smarting wounds as a deliverance
from temptation. For the Divine love had sought me,
and penetrated me, and created a great need in me; like a
seed that wants room to grow. I had been brought up in
carelessness of the true faith; I had not studied the doc-
trines of our religion; but it seemed to take possession of
me like a rising flood. I felt that there was a life of per-
fect love and purity for the soul; in which there would be
no uneasy hunger after pleasure, no tormenting questions,
no fear of suffering. Before I knew the history of the
saints, I had a foreshadowing of their ecstacy. For the
same truth had penetrated even into pagan philosophy:
that it is a bliss within the reach of man to die to mortal
needs, and live in the life of God as the unseen perfect-
ness. But to attain that I must forsake the world: I must
have no affection, no hope, wedding me to that which
passeth away: I must live with my fellow-beings only as
human souls related to the, eternal unseen life. That need
Avas urging me continually: it came over me in visions
when my mind fell away weary from the vain Avords Avhich
record the passions of dead men : it came over me after I
had been tempted into sin and had turned away with
loathing from the scent of the emptied cup. And in
visions I saw the meaning of the Crucifix."

He paused, breathing hard for a minute or two: but
Eomola was not prompted to speak again. It was useless
for her mind to attempt any contact with the mind of this
unearthly brother: as useless as for her hand to try and
grasp a shadow. When he spoke again his heaving chest
was quieter.

*' I felt whom I must follow: but I saAv that even among

152 ROMOLA.

the servants of the Cross who professed to have renounced
the world, my soul would be stifled with the fumes of
hypocrisy, and lust, and pride. God had not chosen me,
as he chose Saint Dominic and Saint Francis, to wrestle
with evil in the Church and in the world. He called upon
me to flee: I took the sacred vows and I fled — fled to lands
Avhere danger and scorn and want bore me continually,
like angels to repose on the bosom of God. I have lived
the life of a hermit, I have ministered to pilgrims; but my
task has been short: the veil has worn very thin that
divides me from my everlasting rest. I came back to
Florence that — "

" Dino, you did want to know if my father was alive,''
interrupted Romola, the picture of that suffering life
touching her again with the desire for union and forgive-
ness.

" that before I died I might urge others of our

brethren to study the Eastern tongues, as I had not done,
and go out to greater ends than I did; and I find them
already bent on the work. And since I came, Romola, I
have felt that I was sent partly to thee — not to renew the
bonds of earthly affection, but to deliver the heavenly
warning conveyed in a vision. For I have had that vision
thrice. And through all the years since first the Divine
voice called me, while I was yet in tlie world, I have been
taught and guided l)y visions. For in the painful linking
together of our waking thoughts we can never be sure that
we have not mingled our own error with the light we have
prayed for; but in visions and dreams we are passive, and
our souls are as an instrument in the Divine hand. There-
fore listen, and speak not again — for the time is short."

Romola's mind recoiled strongly from listening to this
vision. Her indignation had subsided, but it was only
because she had felt the distance between her brother and
herself widening. But Avhile Fra Luca was speaking, the
figure of another monk had entered, and again stood on
the other side of the bed, with the cowl drawn over his
head.

" Kneel, my daughter, for the Angel of Death is present,
and waits while the message of heaven is delivered: bend
thy pride before it is bent for thee by a yoke of iron,"
said a strong rich voice, startingly in contrast with Fra
Luca's.

The tone \\as not that of imperious command, but of
quiet self-possession and assurance of the right, blended

THE DYING MESSAGE. 153

with benignity. Romola, vibrating to the sound, looked
round at the figure on the opposite side of the bed. His
face was hardly discernible under the shadow of the cowl,
and her eyes fell at once on his hands, which were folded
across his breast and lay in relief on the edge of his black
mantle. They had a marked physiognomy which enforced
the influence of the voice: they were very beautiful and
almost of transparent delicacy.' Romola's disposition to
rebel against command, doubly active in the presence of
monks, whom she had been taught to despise, would have
fixed itself on any repulsive detail as a point of suijport.
But the face was hidden, and the hands seemed to have an
appeal in them against all hardness. The next moment
the right hand took the crucifix to relieve the fatigued
grasp of Fra Luca, and the left touched his lips with a wet
sponge which lay near. In the act of bending, the cowl
was pushed back, and the features of the monk had the
full light of the tapers on them. They were very marked
features, such as lend themselves to popular description.
There was the high arched nose, the prominent under lip,
the coronet of thick dark hair above the brow, all seem-
ing to tell of energy and passion; there were the blue-gray
eyes, shining mildly under auburn eyelashes, seeming, like
the hands, to tell of acute sensitiveness. Romola felt
certain they were the features of Fra Girolama Savonarola,
the prior of San Marco, whom she had chiefly thought of
as more offensive than other monks, because he was more
noisy. Her rebellion was rising against the first impres-
sion, which had almost forced her to bend her knees.

" Kneel, my daughter," the penetrating voice said again,
''the pride of the body is a barrier against the gifts that
purify the soul."

He was looking at her with mild fixedness while he
spoke, and again she felt that subtle mysterious influence
of personality by which it has been given to some rare men
to move their fellows.

Slowly Eomola fell on her knees, and in the very act a
tremor came over her; in the renunciation of her 'proud
erectness, her mental attitude seemed changed, and she
found herself in a new state of passiveness. Her brother
began to speak again —

"Eomola, in the deep night, as I lay awake, I saw my
father's room — the library — with all the books and the
marbles and the leggio, where I used to stand and read;
and I saw you — you were revealed to me as I see you now,

154 ROMOLA.

with fair long hair, sitting before my father's chair. And
at the leggio stood a muu whose face I could not see. I
looked, and looked, and it was a blank to me, even as a
painting effaced; and I saw him move and take thee,
Eomola, by the hand; and then I saw thee take my*father
by the hand; and you all three went down the stone steps
into the streets, the man whose face was a blank to me
leading the way. And you stood at the altar in Santa
Croce, and the priest who married you had the face of
death; and the graves opened, and the dead in their
shrouds rose and followed you like a bridal train. And
you passed on through the streets and the gates into the
valley, and it seemed to me that he who led you hurried
you more than you could bear, and the dead were weary of
"following you, and turned back to their graves. And at
last you came to a stony place where there ^\■as no Avater,
and no trees or herbage; but instead of water, I saw writ-
ten parchment unrolling itself everywhere, and instead of
trees and herbage I saw men of bronze and marble spring-
ing up and crowding round you. And my father was faint
for want of water and fell to the ground; and the man
whose face was a blank loosed thy hand and departed : and
as he went I could see his face; and it was the face of the
Great Tempter. And thou, Komola, didst wring thy hands
and seek for water, and there was none. And the bronze
and marble figures seemed to mock thee and liold out cups
of water, and when thou didst grasp them and put them
to my father's lips, they turned to parchment. And the
bronze and marble figures seemed to turn into demons and
snatch my father's body from thee, and the parchments
shrivelled up; and blood ran everywhere instead of them,
and fire upon the blood, till they all vanished, and the plain
was bare and stony again, and thou wast alone in the
midst of it. And then it seemed that the night fell and I
saw no more. Thrice I have had that vision, Eomola. I
believe it is a revelation meant for thee: to warn thee
tigainst marriage as a temptation of the enemy; it calls
upon thee to dedicate thyself "

His pauses had gradually become longer and more fre-
quent, and he was now compelled to cease by a severe fit
of gasping, in which his eyes were turned on the crucifix
as on a light that was vanisliing. Presently he found
strength to speak again, but in a feebler, scarcely audible
tone.

'' To renounce the vain philosophy and corrupt thoughts

THE DYIXO MFSSATtE. 155

of tne heathens: for in the hour of sorrow and death
their pride will turn to mockery^ and the unclean gods
will—"

The.words died away.

In spite of the thought that was at work in Romola,
telling her that this vision was no more than a dream, fed
by youthful memories and ideal convictions, a strange awe
had come over her. Her mind was not apt to be assailed
by sickly fancies; she had the vivid intellect and the healthy
human passion, which are too keenly alive to the constant
relations of things to have any morbid craving after the
exceptional. Still the images of the vision she despised
jarred and distressed her like painful and cruel cries. And
it was the first time she had witnessed the struggle with
approaching death: her young life had been sombre, but
she had known nothing of the utmost human needs; no
acute suffering — no heart-cutting sorrow; and this brother,
come back to her in his liour of supreme agony, was like a
sudden awful apparition from an invisible world. The
pale faces of sorroAv in the fresco on the opposite wall
seemed to have come nearer, and to make one company
with the pale face on the bed.

" Frate," said the dying voice.

Fra Girolamo leaned down. But no other words came
for some moments.

" Romola," it said next.

She leaned forward too: but again there was silence.
The words were struggling in vain,

*'Fra Girolamo, give her "

"The crucifix," said the voice of Fra Girolamo.
' IS^o other sound came from the dying lips.

''Dino!" said Romola, with a low but piercing cry, as
the certainty came upon her that the silence of. misunder-
standing could never be broken.

" Take the crucifix, my daughter," said Fra Girolamo,
after a few minutes. "His eyes behold it no more."

Romola stretched out her hand to the crucifix, and this
act appeared to relieve the tension of her mind. A great
sob burst from her. She bowed her head by the side of
her dead brother, and wept aloud.

It seemed to her as if this first vision of death must alter
the daylight for her for evermore.

Fra Girolamo moved toward the door, and called in a
lay Brother who was waiting outside. Then he went up
to Romola and said in a tone of gentle command, " Rise

156 ROMOLA.

my daughter, and be comforted. Our brother is with the
blessed. He has left you the crucifix, in remembrance of
the heavenly warning — that it may be a beacon to you in
the darkness. ''

She rose from her knees, trembling, folded her veil over
her head, and hid the crucifix under her mantle. Fra
Girohtmo then lead the way out into the cloistered court,
lit now only by the stars and by a lantern, which was held
by some one near the entrance. Several other figures in
the dress of the dignified laity were grouped about the
same spot. They were some of the numerous frequenters
of San Marco, who had come to visit the Prior, and
having heard that he was in attendance on the dying
Brother in the chapter-house, had awaited him here.

Romola was dimly conscious of footsteps and rustling
forms moving aside: she heard the voice of Fra Girolamo
saying, in a low tone, " Our brother is departed; " she felt
a hand laid on her arm. The next moment the door was
opened, and she was out in the wide piazza of San Marco,
with no one but Monna Brigida, and the servant carrying
the lantern.

The fresh sense of space revived her, and helped her to
recover her self-mastery. I'he scene which had just closed
upon her was terribly distinct and vivid, but it began to
narrow nnder the returning imi)ressions of the life that la}'
outside it. She hastened her steps, with nervous anxiety
to be again with her father — and with Tito — for were
they not together in her absence? The images of that vis-
ion, while they clung about her like a hideous dream, not
yet to be shaken off, made her yearn all tlie more for the
beloved faces and voices that would assure her of her
waking life.

Tito, we know, was not with Bardo; his destiny was
being shaped by a guilty consciousnes,s, urging on him the
despairing belief that by this time Romola possessed the
knowledge which would lead to their final separation.

And the lips that could have conveyed that knowledge
were forever closed. The prevision that Fra Luca's words
had imparted to Romola had been such as comes from the
shadowy region where human souls seek wisdom apart from
the human sympathies which are the very life and sub-
stance of our wisdom; the revelation that might have
come fr(m"i tlic simple questions of filial and brotherly
affection had been carried into irrevocable silence.

A PLOEEXTIXE JOEE. 157

CHAPTER XVI.

A FLOEEJSTTIXE JOKE.

Early the next morning Tito was returning from
Bratti s shop m the narrow thoroughfare of the Ferravec-
clii. liie Genoese stranger had carried away the onvx
ring, and Tito was carrying away fifty florins. It did
just cross his mmd that if, after^all. Fortune, by one of
her able devices, saved him from the necessity of quitting
Florence, It woukl be better for him not to have parted
with his rmg, since he had been understood to wear it for
.he sake of peculiar memories and predilections; still it
was a slight matter, not worth dwelling on witli any
emphasis, and m those moments he had lost his confidence
ill iortune. The feverish excitement of the first alarm
which had impelled his mind to travel into the future had
given place to a dull, regretful lassitude. He cared so
much for the pleasures that could only come to him
through the good opinion of his fellow-men, that he
wished now he had never risked ignominy by shrinking
fiom what his fellow-men called obligations.

But our deeds are like children that are born to us-
they live and act apart from our own will. Nay, children

'SZ^Llr?^\'^:^ ^''^ '^T^' '"'''''-• ^^'^y ^^^'^ ^n inde-
fW i ii f both m and out of our consciousness; and
that dreadful vitality of deeds was pressing hard on Tito
tor the first time. -i o

r W,w f 'f^i ^""^^ *? ^?^' lodgings in the Piazza di San
vi^Ii ^ 11 "" ''''?''^^'^ P^^'^^^ through the Mercato
Vecchio, which was his nearest way, lest he should see
lessa. He was not m the humor to seek am-thing; he
could only await the first sign of his altering lot. ^

ihe piazza with its sights of beauty was lit up by that
warm morning sunlight under which the autumn dew still
lingers, and which invites to an idlesse undulled by
l^tigue. It was a festival morning, too, when the soft
warmtn seems to steal over one with a special invitation
^rP r/'- "^f/^^^- Here, too, the signs of the fair were
present, m the spaces round the octagonal baptistery,
sta Is were being spread with fruits and flowers, and here
and there laden mules were standing quietly absorbed in
their nose bags, while their drivers were perhaps gone
through the hospitable sacred doors to kneel before^Jhe

158 ROMOLA.

blessed Virgin on this morning of her Nativity. On the
broad marble steps of the Duomo there were scattered
groups of beggars and gossiping talkers: here an old crone
with white hair and hard sunburnt face encouraging a
round-cap23ed baby to try its tiny bare feet on the warmed
marble, while a dog sitting near snuifed at the perform-
ance suspiciously; there a couple of shaggy-headed boys
leaning to watch a small pale cripple who was cutting
a face on a cherry-stone; and above them on the wide
platform men were making changing knots in laughing-
desultory chat, or else were standing in close couples gestic-
ulating eagerly.

But the largest and most important company of loungers
was that toward which Tito had to -direct his steps. It
was the busiest time of the day with Xello, and in tliis
warm season and at an hour when clients were numerous,
most men preferred being shaved under the pretty red and
white awning in front of the shop rather than within
narrow walls. It is not a sublime attitude for a man, to
sit with lathered chin thrown backward, and have his nose
made a handle of; but to be shaved was a fashion of Floren-
tine respectability, and it is astonishing how gravely men
look at each other when they are all in the fashion. It
was the hour of the day, too, when yesterday's crop of
gossip was freshest, and the barber's tongue was always in
its glory when his razor was busy; the deft activity of those
two instruments seemed to be set going by a common
spring. Tito foresaw that it would be impossible for him
to escape being drawn into the circle; he must smile and
retort, and look perfectly at his ease. Well ! it was but the
ordeal of swallowing bread and cheese pills after all. The
man who let the mere anticipation of discovery choke him
Avas simply a man of weak nerves.

But just at that time Tito felt a hand laid on his shoulder,
and no amount of previous resolution could prevent the
very unpleasant sensation with Avhich that sudden toucli
jarred him. His face, as he turned it round, betrayed the
inward shock; but the owner of the hand that seemed to
have such evil magic in it broke into a light laugh. He
was a young man about Tito's own age, with keen features,
small close-clipped head, and close-shaven lip and chin,
giving the idea of a mind as little encumbered as possible
with material that was not nervous. The keen eyes were
bright with hope and friendliness, as so many other young
eyes have been that have afterward closed on the world in

A FLORENTINE JOKE. .159

bitterness and disappointment; for at that time there were
none but pleasant predictions about Xiccolo Maccliiavelli
as a young man of promise, who was expected to mend
tlie broken fortunes of his ancient family.

"Why Melema what evil dream did you have last
night that you took my light grasp for that of a shirro or
something worse? '

''Ah, Messer Niccolol" said Tito, recovering himself
immediately; "it must have been an extra amount of dull-
ness m my veins this morning that shuddered at the
appi'oach of your wit. But the fact is, I have had a bad

"That is unlucky, because you will be expected to shine
without any obstructing fog to-day in the Rucellai Gardens.
1 take It tor granted vou are to be there."

"Messer Bernardo did me the honor to invite me," said
iito; • but i shall Ijc engaged elsewhere."

"Ah! I remember, you are in love," said Macchiavelli,
with a shrug, -else you would never have such incon-
venient engagements. Why we are to eat a peacock and
ortolans under the loggia among Bernardo Rucellai's rare
trees; there are to be the choicest spirits in Florence and
the choicest wines. Only, as Piero de Medici is to be
tliere, Jie choice spirits may happen to be swamped in the
capping-^ of impromptu verses. I hate that game; it is a
device for the triumph of small wits, who are always
inspired the most by the smallest occasions."

" |\hat is that you are saying about Piero de Medici and
small wits, Messer Mccolo?" said J^^ello, whose light figure
was at that moment predominating over the Herculean
frame of IS iccolo Caparra.

That famous worker in iron, whom we saw last with
bared muscular arms and leathern apron in the Mercato
V ecciiio, was this morning dressed in holiday suit, and as he
sat submissively while Xello skipped round him, lathered
liim seized him by the nose, and scraped him with magical
quickness, he looked much as a lion might if it had donned
linen and tunic and was preparing to go into society.

A private secretary will never rise in the world if he
couples great and small in that way," continued Nello.
W hen great men are not allowed to marry their sons and
daughters as they like, small men must not expect to
marry their words as they like. Have you heard the news
I>omenico Cennini, here, has been telling us? — that Pago-
lantonio Soderini has given Ser Piero da^Bibbiena a box on

160 ROMOLA.

the ear for setting on Piero de Medici to interfere with the
marriage beween young Tommaso Soderini and Fiammetta
Strozzi, and is to be sent ambassador to Venice as a punish-
ment ? "

"I don't know which I envyhim most/' said Macchia-
velli, "the offence or the punishment. The offence will
make him the most popular man in all Florence, and tlie
punishment will take him among the only people in Italy
who have known how to manage their own affairs."

'' Yes, if Soderini stays long enough at Venice," said
Cennini, "he may chance to learn the Venetian fashion,
and bring it home with him. The Soderini have been fast
friends of the Medici, but what has happened is likely to
open Pagolantonio's eyes to the good of our old Florentine
trick of choosing a new harness when the old one galls us;
if we have not quite lost the trick in these last fifty years."

" Not we," said Xiccolo Caparra, who was rejoicing in tlie
free use of his lips again. " Eat eggs in Lent and the snow
will melt. That's what I say to our peojile when they get
noisy over their cups at San Gallo, and talk of raising a
romor (insurrection): I say, never do you plan a romor;
you may as well try to fill Arno with buckets. When
there's water enough Arno will be full, and that will not
be till the torrent is ready."

"Caparra, that oracular speech of yours is due to my
excellent shaving," said Nello. "You could never have
made it with that dark rust on your chin. Ecco, Messer
Domenico, I am ready for you now. By the way, my bel
erudito," continued Nello, as he saw Tito moving toward
the door, "here has been old Maso seeking for you, but
your nest was empty. He will come again presently. The
old man looked mournful, and seemed in haste. I hope
there is nothing wrong in the Via de Bardi."

"Doubtless Messer Tito knows that Bardo's son is dead,"
said Cronaca, who had just come up.

Tito's heart gave a leap — had the death happened before
[ioinola saw him?

" No, I had not heard it," he said, with no more discom-
j)0sure than the occasion seemed to warrant, turning and
leaning against the doorpost, as if he had given up his
intention of going away. "I knew that his sister had
gone to see him. Did he die before she arrived?"

"No," said Cronaca; "I was in San Marco at the time,
and saw her come out from the cliapter-house with Fra
Girolamo, who told us that the dying man's breath had

A FLORENTINE JOKE. 161

been preserved as by a miracle, that he might make a dis-
closure to his sister."

Tito felt that his fate was decided. Again his mind
rushed over all the circumstances of his departure from
Florence, and he conceived a plan of getting back his
money from Oennini before the disclosure had become pub-
lic. If he once had his money he need not stay long in
endurance of scorching looks and biting words. He would
wait now, and go away with Cenniui and get the money
from him at once. With that project in his mind he stood
motionless — his hands in his belt, his eyes fixed absently
on the ground. Nello, glancing at him, felt sure that he
was absorbed in anxiety about Komola, and thought him
such a pretty image of self-forgetful sadness, that he just
perceptibly pointed his razor at him, and gave a challeng-
ing look at Piero di Cosimo, whom he had never forgiven
for his refusal to see any prognostics of character in his
favorite's handsome face. Piero, who Avas leaning against
the other doorpost, close to Tito, shrugged his shoulders:
the frequent recurrence of such challenges from Nello had
changed the painter's first declaration of neutrality into a
positive inclination to believe ill of the much-praised
Greek.

" So you have got your Fra Girolamo back again, Cro-
naca? I suppose we shall have him preaching again this
next Advent," said Nello.

" x\nd not before there is need," said Cronaca, gravely.
"We have had the best testimony to his words since the
last Quaresima; for even to the wicked wickedness has
become a plague; and the ripeness of vice is turning to
rottenness in the nostrils of the vicious. There has not
been a chance since the Quaresima, either in Rome or at
Florence, but has put a new seal on the Frate's words —
that the harvest of sin is ripe, and that God will reap it
with a sword."

"I hope he has had a new vision, however," said Fran-
cesco Cei, sneer ingly. '^ The old ones are somewhat stale.
Can't your Frate get a poet to help out his imagination for
him?''

"He has no lack of poets about him>" said Cronaca,
with quiet contempt, "but they are great poets and not
little ones; so they are contented to be taught by him, and
no more think the truth stale which God has given him to
utter, than they think the light of the moon is stale. But
perhaps certain high prelates and princes who dislike the
11

16"2 ROMOLA.

Frate's denimciatioiis might be pleased to hear that, though
Giovanni Pico, and Poliziano, and Marsilio Ficino, aii .
most other men of mark in Florence, reverence Fra Gir: -
buno, ^fesser Francesco Cei despises him."

■■Palizianor '^ said Cei, with a scornful laugh, •'•Yes.
doubtless he believes in vour new .Jonah; witness the fine
orations he wrote for the envoys of Sienna, to tell Alexan-
der the Sixth that the world and the Church were never
so well off as since he became Pope."

•'• Xay. Francesco,"' said Macchiavelli, smiling, "aTariou:
scholar must have variotis opinions. And as for the Frate,
whatever we may think of his saintliness, you judge his
preaching too narrowly. The secret of oratory lies, not in
saving new things, but in saying things with a certain
power that moves the hearers — without which, as oil
Filelfo has said, your speaker deserves to be called, •' nc i-
oratorum. sed «ratorem.' And, according to that test. Fra
Giro] am o is a great orator."

"That is true. Xiccolo," said Cennini, speaking from
the shaving chair, "but part of the secret lies in the
prophetic visions. Onr people — no offense to you, Cronaco
— will run after anything in the shape of a prophet,
especially if he prophesies terrors and tribulations.''

••Bather say, Cennini," answered Cronaca, '"'that th'^^
chief secret lies in the Frate's ptire life and strong faitl..
which stamp him as a messenger of God."

'•I admit it — I admit it." said Cennini, ojjening hi-
palms, as he rose from the chair. "His life is spotless.
no man has impeached it."

•'•'He is satisfied with the pleasant lust of arrogance,"
Cei burst out, bitterly. " I can see it in that proud lip
and satisfied eye of his. He hears the air filled with hi-
own name — Fra Girolamo Savonarola, of Ferrara; tl. -
prophet, the saint, the mighty preacher, who frightens th-
verv babies of Florence into laying down their wickei
baubles."

"Come, come, Francesco, you are out of humor with
waiting," said the conciliatory Xello. ''Let me stop you:
mouth" with a little lather. I must not have my friend
Cronaca made angry: I have a regard for his chin: an 1
his chin is in no respect altered since he became a Piag-
none. And for my own part, I confess, when the Fra:
was preaching in the Duomo last Advent, I got into sue:
a trick of slipping in to listen to him that I might hav
tume»il Piagnone too, if I had not been hindered by tb

A FLOKENTINE JOKE. 163

liberal nature of my art; and also by the length of the ser-
mons, which are sometimes a good while before they get
to the moving point. But, as Messer Niccolo here says,
the Fratc lays hold of the people by some power over and
above his prophetic visions. Monks and nuns who prophesy
are not of that rareness. For what saj^s Luigi Pulci?
' Dombruno's sharp-cutting scimitar had the fame of beiug
enchanted; but/ says Luigi, 'I am rather of opinion that
it cut sharp because it was of strongl^^-tempered steel.'
Yes, yes; Paternosters may shave clean,'but they must be
said over a good razor."

'SSee, Nello!"said Macchiavelli, ''what doctor is this
advancing on his Bucephalus? I thought your piazza was
free from those furred and scarlet-robed lackeys of death.
This man looks as if he had had some such night adven-
ture as Boccaccio's Maestro Simone, and had his bonnet
and mantle pickled a little in the gutter; though he him-
self is as sleek as a miller's rat."

"A-ah!" said Nello, with a long-drawn intonation, as
he looked iip toward the advancing figure — a round-headed,
round-bodied personage, seated on a raw young horse,
which held its nose out with an air of threatening obsti-
nacy, and by a constant effort to back and go off in an
oblique line showed free views about authority very much
in advance of the age.

•'And I have a few more adventures in pickle for him,"
continued JSTello, in an undertone, "which I hope will
drive his inquirmg nostrils to another quarter of the city.
He's a doctor from Padua; they say he has been at Prato
for three months, and now he's come to Florence to see
what he can net. But his great trick is making rounds
among the contadini. And do you note those great saddle-
bags he carries? They are to hold the fat capons and eggs
and meal he levies on silly clowns with whom coin is scarce.
He vends'his own secret medicines, so he keeps away from
the doors of the druggists; and for this last week he has
taken to sitting in my piazza for two or three hours every
day, and making it a resort for asthmas and squalling
bambini. It stirs my gall to see the toad-faced quack
fingering the greasy quattrini, or bagging a pigeon in
exchange for his pills and powders. But I'll put a few
thorns in his saddle, else I'm no Florentine. Laudamus!
he IS coming to be shaved; that's what I've waited for.
Messer Domeaicio, go not away: wait; you shall see a rare

1G4 ROM OLA.

bit of fooling, which I devised two days ago. Here,
Sandro!"

Nello whispered in the ear of Sandro, who rolled his
solemn eyes, nodded, and, following up these signs of
understanding with a slow smile, took to his heels with
surprising rapidity.

"How is it with you. Maestro Tacco?" said JS'ello, as
the doctor, with difficulty, brought his horse's head round
toward the barber's shop. " That is a fine young horse of
yours, but something raw in the mouth, eh?"

"He is an accursed beast, the vermocane seize him!"
said Maestro Tacco, Avith a burst of irritation, descending
from his saddle and fastening the old bridle, mended with
string, to an iron staple in the wall. "Nevertheless," he
added, recollecting himself, "a sound beast and a valuable,
for one who wanted to purchase, and get a profit by train-
ing him. I had him cheap."

"Eather too hard riding for a man who carries your
weight of learning: eh. Maestro?" said Nello. "You
seem hot."

" Truly, I am likely to be hot," said the doctor, taking
off his bonnet, and giving to full view a bald low head and
flat broad face, with high ears, wide lipless mouth, round
eyes, and deep arched lines above the jirojecting eyebrows,
which altogether made Nello's epithet "toad-faced"
dubiously complimentary to the blameless batrachiau.
"Riding from Peretola, when the sun is high, is not the
same thing as kicking your heels on a bench in the shade,
like your Florence doctors. Moreover, I have had not a
little pulling to get through the carts and mules into the
Mercato, to find out the husband of a certain Monna
Ghita, who had had a fatal seizure before I was called in:
and if it had not been that I had to demand my fees "

"Monna Ghita!" said Nello, as the perspiring doctor
interrupted himself to rub his head and face. " Peace be
with her angry soul! The Mercato will want a whip the
more if her tongue is laid to rest."

Tito, who had roused himself from his abstraction, and
was listening to the dialogue, felt a new rush of the
vague half-formed ideas about Tessa, which had passed
through his mind the evening before: if Monna Ghita
were really taken out of the wa)% it would be easier for
him to see Tessa again — whenever he wanted to see her.

"Gnafe, Maestro," Nello went on, in a sympathising
tone, "you are the slave of rude mortals, who, but for

A FLORENTINE JOKE. 165

YOU, would die like brutes, without help of pill or powder.
It is pitiful to see your learned lymph oozing from your
pores as if it were mere vulgar moisture. You think my
shaving will cool and disencumber you? One moment
and I have done with Messer Francesco here. It seems
to, me a thousand years till I wait upon a man who carries
all the science of Arabia in his head and saddle-basrs.
Ecco!"

^ello held up the shaving-cloth with an air of invita-
tion, and Maestro Tacco advanced and seated himself
under a preoccupation with his heat and his self-import-
ance, which made him quite deaf to the irony conveyed
in Nello's officiously polite speech.

"It is but fitting that a great medicus like you," said
Nello, adjusting the cloth, ^"should be shaved by the
same razor that has shave'd the illustrious Antonio
Benevieni, the greatest master of the chirurgic art."

*'The chirurgic art!" interrupted the doctor, with an
air of contemptuous disgust. ''Is it your Florentine
fashion to put the masters of the science of medicine on
a level with men who do carpentry on broken limbs, and
sew up wounds like tailors, and carve away excrescences
as a butcher trims meat? Via! A manual art, such as
any artificer might learn, and which has been practised by
simple barbers like yourself — on a level with the noble
science of Hippocrates, Galen, and Avicenna, which pene-
trates into the occult influences of the stars and plants
and gems! — a science locked up from the vulgar!"

''Xo, in truth, Maestro," said Nello, using his lather
very deliberately, as if he wanted to prolong the operation
to the utmost, "1 never thought of placing them on a
level: I know your science comes next to the miracles of
Holy Church for mystery. But there, you see, is the pity
of it" — here Nello fell into a tone of regretful sympa-
thy— "your high science is sealed from the profane and
the vulgar, and so you become an object of envy and
slander. I grieve to say it, but there are low fellows in
this city — mere sgherri, who go about in nightcaps and
long beards, and make it their business to sprinkle gall in
every man's broth who is prospering. Let me tell you —
for you are a stranger — this is a city w^here every man
had need carry a large nail ready to fasten on the wheel of
Fortune when his side happens to be uppermost. Already
there are stories — mere fables, doubtless, — beginning to
be buzzed about concerning you, that make me wish I

166 KOMOLA.

could hear of your being well on your way to Arezzo. I
would not have a man of your metal stoned, for though
San Stefano was stoned, he was not great in medicine like
San Cosmo and San Damiano."

•^•What stories? what fables?"" stammered Maestro
Tacco. "What do you mean?"

^' Lasso! 1 fear me you are come into the trap for your
cheese, Maestro. The fact is, there is a company of evil
youtlis who go prowling about the houses of our citizens
carrying sharp tools in their pockets; — no sort of door, or
window, or shutter, but they will pierce it. They are pos-
sessed with a diabolical patience to watch the doings of
peojole who fancy themselves private. It must be they
who have done it — it must l^e they who have spread the
stories about you and your medicines. Have you by
chance detected any small aperture in your door, or
window-shutter? No? Well, I advise you to look; for it
is now commonly talked of that you have been seen in
your dwelling at the Canto di Pagiia, making your secret
specifics by night: pounding dried toads in a mortar, com-
pounding a salve out of mashed worms, and making your
pills from the dried livers of rats whicli you mix with
saliva emitted during the utterance of a blasphemous
incantation — which indeed these witnesses profess to
repeat."

"It is a pack of liesl" exclaimed the doctor, strug-
gling to get utterance, and then desisting in alarm at the
approaching razoi".

" It is not to me, or any of this resi^ectable company,
that you need say that, doctor. We are not the heads to
plant such carrots as those in. But what of that? AYhat
are a handful of i-easonable men against a crowd with
stones in their hands? There arc those among us who
think Cecco d'Ascoli was an innocent sage — and we all
know how he was burnt alive for being Aviser than his
fellows. Ah, ducter, it is not by living at Padua that 3'ou
can learn to know Florentines. ]\Iy belief is, they would
stone the Holy Father himself, if they could find a good
excuse for it; and they are persuaded that you are a
necromancer, who is trying to raise the pestilence by sell-
ing secret medicines — and I am told your specifics have
in truth an evil smell.''

" It is false!" burst out the doctor, as Nello moved away
his razor; "it is false! I will show the pills and the
powders to these honorable signori — and the salve — it has

A FLORENTINE JOKE. 167

an excellent odor— an odor of— of salve/' He started up
with the kther on his chin, and the cloth round his neck
to search ni his saddle-bag for the belied medicines, and
JNello man instant adroitly shifted the shaving-chair till
It was m the close vicinity of the horse's head, while
bandro who had now returned, at a sign from his master
placed himself near the bridle.

"Behold Wesseri!-' said the doctor, bringing a small
box ot medicines and opening it before them. '' Let anv
signor apply this box to his nostrils and he will find an
honest odor of medicaments— not indeed of pounded gems
or rare vegetables from the East, or stones found in the
bodies of birds; for I practice on the diseases of the vulgar
for whom heaven has provided cheaper and less powerful
remedies according to their degree: and there are even
remedies known to our science which are entirely free of
cost— as the new tussis may be counteracted in the poor
who can pay for no specifics, by a resolute holding of the
breath. And here is a paste which is even of savorv
odor, and is infallible against melancholia, being concocted
under the conjunction of Jupiter and Venus: and I have
seen it allay spasms."

"Stay Maestro," said Nello, while the doctor had his
lathered face turned towards the group near the door,
eagerly holding out his box, and lifting out one specific
alter another here comes a crying contadina with her
o^Vni-f. ^^''^^1^^' ^^le i« ^^ search of you; it is perhaps an
opportunity for you to show this honorable company a
proof of your skill Here, buonna donna! here is the

lTndo9'' ^' ^^""^ '' "'^ '"^^*''" ^'^^'' *^^^ ^^'^^^

This question was addressed to a sturdy-looking, broad-
shouldered contadma, with her head-drapery folded about
hei face, so that little was to be seen but a bronzed nose
and a pair of dark eyes and eyebrows. She carried her-
child packed up 111 the stifl: mummy-shaped case in which
Italian babies have been from time immemorial introduced
into society, turning its face a little toward her bosom,
and making those sorrowful grimaces which women are in
the habit of using as a sort of pulleys to draw down reluct-
ant tears.

"Oh, for the love of the Holy Madonna!" said the
wonian ma wailmg voice, "will you look at my poor
^mbo.^ I know I can^t pay for it, but I took it into the
JNunziata last night, and it's turned a worse color than

168 EOMOLA.

before: it's the convulsions. But when I was holding it
before the Santissima Nunziata, I remembered they said
there was a new doctor come who cured everything; and
so I thought it might be the will of the Holy Madonna
that I should bring it to you."

" Sit down, Maestro, sit down," said Nello. " Here is
an opportunity for you; here are honorable witnesses who
will declare before the Magnificent Eight that they have
seen you practising honestly and relieving a poor woman's
child. And then if your life is in danger, the Magnificent
Eight will put you in prison a little while just to insure
your safety, and after that their sbirri will conduct you
out of Florence by night, as they did the zealous Frate
Minore, who preached against the Jews. What! our people
are given to stone-throwing; but we have magistrates."

The doctor, unable to refuse, seated himself in the
shaving-chair, trembling, half with fear and half with
rage, and by this time quite unconscious of the lather
which Nello had laid on with such profuseness. He
deposited his medicine-case on his knees, took out his
precious spectacles (wondrous Florentine device!) from his
wallet, lodged them carefully above his flat nose and high
ears, and lifting up his brows, turned toward the ap-
plicant.

''0 Santiddio! look at him," said the woman, with a
more piteous wail than ever, as she held out the small
mummy, which had its head completely concealed by dingy
drapery wound round the head of the portable cradle, but
seemed to be struggling and crying in a demoniacal fashion
under this imprisonment. "The fit is on him I Oliime!
I know what color he is; it's the evil eye oh I "'

The doctor, anxiously holding his knees together to
support his box, bent his spectacles toward the baby, and
said cautiously, ''It may be a new disease; unwind these
rags, Monna ! "

The contadina, with sudden energy, snatched off the
encircling linen, when out struggled — scratching, grinning,
and screaming — what the doctor in his fright fully believed
to be a demon, but what Tito recognized as Vaiano's
monkey, made more formidable by an artificial blackness,
such as might have come from a hasty rubbing up the
chimney.

Up started the unfortunate doctor, letting his medicine-
box fall, and awa.y jumped the no less terrified and indig-
nant monkey, finding the first resting-place for his claws

A FLORENTINE JOKE. 169

on the horse's mane, which he used as a sort of rope-ladder
till -he had fairly found his equilibrium, when he continued
to clutch it as a bridle. The horse wanted no spur under
such a rider, and, the already loosened bridle offering no
resistance, darted off across the piazza, with the monkey,
clutching, grinning, and blinking, on his neck.

"II cavallo! 11 Diavolo!" was now shouted on all sides
by the idle rascals who gathered from all quarters of the
piazza, and was echoed in tones of alarm by the stall-
keepers, whose vested interests seemed in some danger;
while the doctor, out of his wits with confused terror at
the Devil, the possible stoning, and the escape of the horse,
took to his heels with spectacles on nose, lathered face,
and the shaving-cloth about his neck, crying — "Stop him!
stop him! for a powder— a florin— stop him for a florin!"
while the lads, outstripping him, clapped their hands and
shouted encouragement to the runaway.

The cerretam, who had not bargained for the flight of
his monkey along with the horse, had caught up his petti-
coats with much celerity, and showed a pair of parti-colored
hose above his contadina's shoes, far in advance of the
doctor. And away went the grotesque race up the Corso
degh Adimari— the horse with the singular jockey, the
contadina with the remarkable hose, and the doctor in
lather and spectacles, with furred mantle flying.

It was a scene such as Forentines loved, from the potent
and reverend signer going to council in his lucco, down to
the grinning youngster, who felt himself master of all sit-
uations when his bag was filled with smooth stones from
the convenient dry bed of the torrent. The grey-headed
Domenico Cennini laughed no less heartily than the
younger men, and Nello was triumphantly secure of the
general admiration.

"Aha!" he exclaimed, snapping his fingers when the
first burst of laughter was subsiding. "I have cleared
my piazza of that unsavory fly-trap, mi pare. Maestro
Tacco will no more come here again1;o sit for patients than
he will take to licking marble for his dinner."

"You are going toward the Piazza della Signoria, Mes-
ser Domenico," said Macchiavelli. "I will go with you,
and we shall perhaps see who has deserved the p alio among
these racers. Come, Melema, will you go too?"

It had been precisely Tito's intention to accompany
Cennini, but before he had gone many steps, he was called
back by Nello, who saw Maso approaching.

170 KO.MOLA.

Maso's message was from Eomola. She wished Tito to
go to the Via cle Bardi as soon as possible. She would see
him under the loggia, at the top of the house, as she
wished to speak to him alone.

CHAPTER XVII.

UNDER THE LOGGIA.

The loggia at the toj) of Bnrdo's house rose above tlie
buildings on each side of it, and formed a galler}' round
quadrangular walls. On the side toward the street the
roof was supported by columns; but on the remaining
sides, by a wall pierced with arclied openings, so that at
the back, looking over a crowd of irregular, poorly-built
dwellings toward tlie hill of Bogoli, KomoJa could at all
times have a walk sheltered from observation. Near one
of those arched openings, close to the door by which he
had entered the loggia, Tito awaited her, with a sickening
sense of the sunligiit that slanted before him and mingled
itself with the ruin of his hojies. He had never for a
moment relied on Eomola's passion for him as likely to be
too strojig for the repulsion created by the discovery of
his secret; he had not the presumj^tious vanity which
might have hindered him from feeling that her love had
the same root with her belief in him. But as he imag-
ined her coming toward him in her radiant beauty, made
so loveably mortal by her soft hazel eyes, he fell into wish-
ing that she had been something lower, if it were only
that she might let him clas}! her and kiss her before they
parted. He had had no real caress from her — nothing but
now and then a long glance, a kiss, a pressure of the hand;
and he had so often longed that they should be alone
together. They were going to be alone now; but he saAV
her standing inexorably aloof from him. His heart gave
a great throb as he saw the door move: IJomola was there.
It was all like a flash of lightning: he felt, rather than
saw, the glory about her head, the tearful appealing eyes;
he felt, rather than heard, the cry of love with which she
said, ''Tito!"

And in the same moment she was in his arms, and soIj-
bing with her face against his.

UNDER THE LOGGIA. 171

How poor Bomola had yearned throng]i tlie watches of
the night to see that bright face! The new image of
death; the strange bewildering doubt infused into her by
the story of a life removed from her understanding and
sympathy; the haunting vision, which she seemed not
only to hear uttered by the low gasping voice, but to live
through, as if it had been her own dream, had made her
more conscious than ever that it was Tito who had first
brought the warm stream of hope and gladness into her
life, and who had first turned away the keen edo-e of pain
m the remembrance of her brother. She would tell Tito
everything; there was no one else to whom she could tell
it. She had been restraining herself in the presence of
her father all the morning; but now, that long-pent-up
sob might come forth. Proud and self-controlled to all
the world beside, Romola waa as simple and unreserved as
a child m her love for Tito. She had been quite contented
with the days when they had only looked at each other-
but now, when she felt the need of clinging to him there
was no thought that hindered her. '

"My Romola! my goddess!" Tito murmured with
passionate fondness, as he clasped her gently, and kissed
the thick golden ripples on her neck. He was in paradise-
disgrace, shame, parting— there was no fear of them
any longer. This happiness was too strong to be marred
by the sense that Romola was deceived in him- nay he
could only rejoice in her delusion; for, after all, conceal-
ment had been wisdom. The only thing he could regret
was his needless dread; if, indeed, the dread had not been
worth suffering for the sake of this sudden rapture.

The sob had satisfied itself, and Romola raised her head
Neither of them spoke; they stood looking at each other's
taces with that sweet wonder which belongs to youno-
love— she with her long white hands on the dark-browS
curls, and he with his dark fingers bathed in the stream-
ing gold. Each was so beautiful to the other; each was
experiencing that undisturbed mutual consciousness for
the first time. Tlie cold pressure of a new sadness on
Romola s heart made her linger the more in that silent
soothing sense of nearness and love; and Tito could not
even seek to press his lips to hers, because that would be
change.

''Tito," she said at last, 'Mt has been altogether painful
but 1 must tell you everything. Your strength will help

172 ROMOLA.

me to resist the impressions that will not be shaken off by
reason. "

"I know, Romola — I know he is dead," said Tito; and
the long lustrous eyes told nothing of the many wishes that
Avould have brought about that death long ago if there had
been such potency in mere wishes. Eomola only read lier
own pure thoughts in their dark depths, as we read letters
in happy dreams.

" So changed, Tito! It pierced me to think that it was
Dino. And so strangely hard: not a word to my father;
nothing but a vision that he wanted to tell me. And yet
it was so piteous — the struggling breath, and the eyes that
seemed to look toward the crucifix, and yet not to see it.
I shall never forget it; it seems as if it would come between
me and everything I shall look at."

Romola's heart swelled again, so that she was forced to
break off. But the need she felt to disburden her mind to
Tito urged her to repress the rising anguish. When she
began to speak again, her thoughts had traveled a little.

" It was strange, Tito. The vision was about our mar-
riage, and yet he knew nothing of you."

" What was it, my Romola? Sit down and tell me,"
said Tito, leading her to the bench that stood near. A fear
had come across him lest the vision should somehow or
other relate to Baldassarre; and this sudden change of
feeling prompted him to seek a change of position.

Romola told him all that had passed, from her entrance
into San Marco, hardly leaving out one of her brother's
words, which had burned themselves into her memory as
they were spoken. But when she was at the end of the
vision, she paused; the rest came too vividly before her to
be uttered, and she sat looking at the distance, almost
unconscious for the moment that Tito was near her. His
mind was at ease now; that vague vision had passed over
him like white mist, and left no mark. But he was silent,
expecting her to speak again.

" I took it," she went on, as if Tito had been reading
her thoughts; '' I took the crucifix; it is down below in my
bedroom."

"And now, my Romola," said Tito, entreatingly, "you
will banish these ghastly thoughts. The vision was an
ordinary monkish vision, bred of fasting and fanatical
ideas. It surely has no weight with you."

'•No, Tito, no. But poor Dino, lie believed it was a
divine message. It is strange," she went on, meditatively,

UNDER THE LOGGIA. 173

'' this life of men possessed with fervid beliefs that seem
like madness to their fellow-beings. Dino was not a vulgar
fanatic; and that Fra Girolamo — his very voice seems to
have penetrated me with a sense that there is some truth in
what moves them: some truth of which I know nothing."

"•' It was only because your feelings were higlily wrought,
my Eomola. Your brother's state of mind was no more
than a form of that theosophy which has been the common
disease of excitable, dreamy minds in all ages; the same
ideas that your father's old antagonist, Marsilio Ficino,
pores over in the New Platonists; only your brother's
passionate nature drove him to act out what other men
write and talk about. And for Fra Girolamo, he is simply
a narrow-minded monk, with a gift of preaching and infus-
ing terror into the multitude. Any words or any voice
would have shaken you at that moment. When your mind
has had a little repose, you will judge of such things as
you have always done before."

''Not about poor Dino," said Romola. "I was angry
with him; my heart seemed to close against him while he
was speaking; but since then I have thought less of what
was in my own mind and more of what was in his. Oh,
Tito! it was very piteous to see his young life coming to
an end in that way. That yearning look at the crucifix
when he was gasping for breath — I can never forget it.
Last night I looked at the crucifix a long while, and tried
to see that it would help him, until at last it seemed to me
by the lamplight as if the suffering face shed pity. "

" My Koniola, promise me to resist such thoughts; they
are fit for sickly nuns, not for my golden-tressed Aurora,
who looks made to scatter all such twilight fantasies.
Try not to think of them now; we shall not long be alone
together."

The last words were uttered in a tone of tender beseech-
ing, and he turned her face toward him with a gentle
touch of his right hand.

Eomola had had her eyes fixed absently on the arched open-
ing, but she had not seen the distant hill; she had all the
while been in the chapter-house, looking at the pale
images of sorrow and death.

Tito's touch and beseeching voice recalled her; and now
in the warm sunlight she saw that rich dark beauty which
seemed to gather round it all images of joy — purple vines
festooned between the elms, the strong corn perfecting
itself under the vibrating heat, bright-winged creatures

174 ROMOLA.

hurrying and resting among the flowers, round limbs beat-
ing the earth in gladness with cymbals held aloft, light
melodies chanted to the thrilling rhythm of strings — all
objects and all sounds that tell of Nature reveling in her
force. Strange, bewildering transition from those pale
images of sorrow and death to this bright youthfulness, as
of a sun-god who knew nothing of night! What thought
could reconcile that worn anguish in her brother's face —
that straining after something invisible — with this satisfied
strength and beauty, and make it intelligible that they
belonged to the same world? Or was there never any
reconciling of them, but only a blind worship of clashing
deities, first in mad joy and then in wailing? Komola for
the first time felt this questioning need like a sudden un-
easy dizziness and want of something to grasp; it was an
experience hardly longer than a sigh, for the eager theoris-
ing of ages is compressed, as in a seed, in the momentary
want of a single mind. But there was no answer to meet
the need, and it vanished before the returning rush of
young sympathy with the glad, loving beauty that beamed
upon her in new radiance, like the dawn after we have
looked away from it to the gray west.

"Your mind lingers apart from our love, my Eomola,"
Tito said, with a soft, reproachful murmur. " It seems a
forgotten thing to 5'ou."

She looked at the beseeching eyes in silence, till the
sadness all melted out of her own.

" My joy!" she said, in her full, clear voice.

''Do you really care for me enough, then, to banish
those chill fancies, or shall you always be suspecting me as
the Great Tempter?" said Tito, with his bright smile.

" How should I not care for you more than for every-
thing else? Everything I had felt before in all my life—
about my father, and about my loneliness— was a prepara-
tion to love you. You would laugh at me, Tito, if you
knew what sort of man I used to think I should marry-
some scholar with deep lines in his face, like Alamanno
Einuccini, and with rather gray hair, who would agree
with my father in taking the side of the Aristotelians, and
be willing to live Avith him. I used to think cabout the
love I read of in the poets, but I never dreamed that any-
thing like that could happen to me here in Florence in our
old library. And tlien you came, Tito, and were so much
to my father, and I began to believe that life could be
happy for me too."

UNDER THE LOGGIA. 175

''My goddess! is there any woman like you?" said Tito,
with a mixture of fondness and wondering admiration at
the blended majesty and simplicity in her.

"But, dearest," he went on, rather timidly, ''if you
minded more about our marriage, you would persuade
your father and Messer Bernardo not to think of any more
delays. But you seem not to mind about it."

" Yes, Tito, I will, I do mind. But I am sure my
godfather will urge more delay now, because of Dino's
death. He has never agreed with my father about disown-
ing Dino, and you know he has always said that we ought
to wait until you have been at least a year in Florence. Do
not think hardly of my godfather. I know he is preju-
diced and narrow, but yet he is very noble. He has often
said that it is folly in my father to want to keep his library
a]3art, that it may bear his name; yet he would try to get
my father's Avish carried out. Tliat seems to me very great
and no])le — that power of respecting a feeling which he
does not share or understand."

" I have no rancor against Messer Bernardo for think-
ing you too precious for me, my Romola," said Tito: and
that was true. " But your father, then, knows of his son's
death?"

*'Yes, I told him — I could not help it. I told him
where I had been, and that I had seen Dino die; but noth-
ing else; and he has commanded me not to si)eak of it
again. But he has been very silent this morning, and has
had those restless movements which always go to my heart;
they look as if he were trying to get outside the prison of
his blindness. Let us go to him now. I had persuaded
him to try to sleep, because he slept little in the night.
Your voice will soothe him, Tito: it always does."

"And not one kiss? I have not had one," said Tito,
in his gentle reproachful tone, which gave him an air of
dependence very charming in a creature with those rare
gifts that seem to excuse presumption.

The sweet pink blush spread itself with the quickness
of light over Romola's face and neck as she bent toward
him. It seemed impossible that their kisses could ever
become common things.

" Let us walk once round the loggia," said Romola,
"before we go down."

" There is something grim and grave to me always
about Florence," said Tito, as they paused in the front of
the house, where they could see over the opposite roofs to

17G EOMOLA.

the other side of the river/' and even in its merriment
there is something shrill and hard — biting rather than
gay. I wish we lived in Southern Italy, where thought is
broken, not by weariness, but by delicious languors such
as never seem to come over the ' ingenia acerrima Floren-
tina.' I should like to see you under that southern sun,
lying among the floAvers, subdued into mere enjoyment,
while I bent over you and touched the lute and sang to
you some little unconscious strain that seemed all one
with the light and the warmth. You have never known
that liappiness of the nymphs, my Eomola."

"No; but I have dreamed of it often since you came.
I am very thirsty for a deep draught of joy — for a life all
bright like you. But we will not think of it now, Tito;
it seems to me as if there would always be pale sad faces
among the flowers, and eyes that look in vain. Let us
go."

CHAPTEE XVIII.

THE PORTKAIT.

When Tito left the Via de' Bardi that day in exultant
satisfaction at finding himself thoroughly free from the
threatened peril, his thoughts, no longer claimed by the
immediate presence of Romola and her father, recurred to
those futile hours of dread in which he was conscious of
having not only felt but acted as he would not have done
if he had had a truer foresight. He would not have
parted with his ring ; for Romola, and others to whom it
was a familiar object, would be a little struck with the
apparent sordidness of parting with a gem he had profess-
edly cherished, unless lie feigned as a reason the desire to
make some special gift with the purchase-money ; and
Tito had at that moment a nauseating weariness of simu-
lation. He was well out of the possible consequences that
might have fallen on him from that initial deception, and
it was no longer a load on his mind ; kind fortune had
brought him immunity, and he thought it was only fair
that she should. Who was hurt by it ? The results to
Baldassarre were too problematical to be taken into account.
But he wanted now to be free from any hidden shackles
that would gall him, though ever so little, under his ties

THE PORTRAIT. 177

to Eomola. He was not aware that every delight in im-
munity which prompted resohitions not to entangle him-
self again, was deadening the sensibilities which alone
could save him from entanglement.

^But, after all, the sale of the ring was a slight matter.
Was it also a slight matter that little Tessa was under a
delusion which would doubtless fill her small head with
expectations doomed to disappointment? Should he try
to see the little thing alone again and undeceive her at
once, or should he leave the disclosure to time and chance?
Happy dreams are pleasant, and they easily come to an end
with daylight and the stir of life. The sweet, pouting
innocent, round thing! It was impossible not to think of
her. Tito thought he should like some time to take her a
present that would please her, and just learn if her step-
father treated her more cruelly now her mother was dead.
Or, should he at once undeceive Tessa, and then tell Eomola
about her, so that they might find some happier lot for the
poor thing? Xo: that unfortunate little incident of the
cerretano and the marriage, and his allowing Tessa to part
from him in delusion, must never be known to Eomola,
and since no enlightenment could expel it from Tessa's
mmd, there would always be a risk of betrayal; besides,
even little Tessa might have some gall in her when she
found herself disappointed in her love — yes, she must be
a httle in love with him. and that might make it well that
he should not see her again. Yet it was a trifling adven-
ture, sucli as a country girl would perhaps ponder on till
some ruddy contadino made acceptable love to her, when
she would break her resolution of secrecy and get at the
truth that she was free. Z^w;^^'?^^— good-bye, Tessa! kind-
est wishes! Tito had made up his mind that the silly little
affair of the cerretano should have no further consequences
for himself; people are apt to think that resolutions taken
on their own behalf will be firm. As for the fifty-five
florins, the purchase-money of the ring, Tito had made up
his mind what to do with some of them; he would carry
out a pretty ingenious thought, which would set him more
at ease i n accounting for the absence of his ring to Eom-
ola, and would also serve him as a means of guarding her
mind from the recurrence of those monkish fancies which
were especially repugnant to him; and with this thought
m his mmd, he went to the Via Gualfonda to find Piero di
Cosimo, the artist who at that time was pre-eminent in the
fantastic mythological design which Tito's purpose required.

178 ROMOLA.

Entering the court on which Piero's dwelling opened,
Tito found the heavy iron knocker on the door thickly
bound round with wool, and ingeniously fastened with
cords. Remembering the painter's practice of stuffing his
ears against obtrusive noises, Tito was not much suri)rised
at this mode of defense against visitors' thunder, and
betook himself first to tapping modestly with his knuckles,
and then to a more important attempt to shake the door.
In vain! Tito was moving away, blaming himself for
wasting his time on this visit, instead of waiting till he
saw the painter again at Nello's, when a little girl entered
the court with a basket of eggs on her arm, went up to the
door, and standing on tiptoe, pushed up a small iron plate
that ran in grooves, and putting her mouth to the aperture
thus disclosed, called out in a piping voice, "Messer Piero!"

In a few moments Tito heard the sound of bolts, the
door opened, and Piero presented himself in a red night-
cap and a loose brown serge tunic, with sleeves rolled up
to the shoulder. He darted a look of surprise at Tito, but
without further notice of him stretched out his hand to
take the basket from the child, re-entered the house, and
presently returning with the empty basket, said, " How
much to pay?"

" Two grossoni, Messer Piero; they are all ready boiled,
my mother says."

Piero took the coin out of the leathern scarsella at his
belt, and the little maiden trotted away, not without a few
upward glances of awed admiration at the surprising young
signer.

Piero's glance was much less complimentary as he said —

"What do you want at my door, Messer Greco? I saw
you this morning at Nello's; if you had asked me then,
I could have told you that I see no man in this house
without knowing his business aud agreeing with him
beforehand."

"Pardon, Messer Piero," said Tito with his imperturb-
able good-humor; " I acted without sufficient reflection.
I remembered nothing but 3"our admirable skill in invent-
ing pretty caprices, wlien a sudden desire for something of
that sort prompted me to come to you."

The painter's manners were too notoriously odd to all
the woi-ld for this reception to be held a special affront;
but even if Tito had suspected any offensive intention, the
impulse to resentment would liave been less strong in him
than the desire to conquer goodwill.

THE PORTRAIT. 179

Piero made a grimace which was liabitual with him when
he was spoken to with flattering snarity. He grinned,
stretched out the corners of his mouth, and pressed down
his brows, so as to defy any divination of his feelings under
that kind of stroking.

'•'And what may that need be?" he said, after a moment's
pause. In his heart he was tempted by the hinted oppor-
tunity of applying his invention.

•' I want very delicate miniature device taken from cer-
tain fables of the poets, which you will know how to com-
bine for me. It must be painted on a wooden case — I will
show you the size — in the form of a triptvch. The inside
may be simple gilding: it is on the outside I want the
device. It is a favorite subject with von Florentines — the
triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne; but I want it treated in
a new way. A story in Ovid will give vou the necessary
hints. The young Bacchus must be seated in a ship, his
head bound with clusters of grapes, and a spear entwined
with vine-leaves in his hand: dark-berried ivy must wind
about the masts and sails, the oars must be" thvrsi, and
flowers must wreathe themselves about the poop; 'leopards
and tigers must be crouching before him. and dolphins
miist be sporting round. But I want to have the fair-
haired Ariadne with him, made immortal with her golden
crown — that is not in Ovid's storv, but no matter, vou
will conceive it all — and above there must be young Loves,
such as you know how to paint, shooting with roses at the

points of their arrows "

" Say no more! " said Piero. "I have Ovid in the vulgar
tongue. Pind me the passage. I love not to be choked
with other men's thoughts. You mav come in."

Piero led the way through the first room, where a basket
of eggs was de^TOsited on the open hearth, near a heap of
broken egg-shells and a bank of ashes. In strange keep-
ing with that sordid litter, there was a low bedstead of
carved ebony, covered carelessly with a piece of rich oriental
carpet, that looked as if it had served to cover the steps to
a Madonna's throne; and a carved cassone, or large chest,
with painted devices on its sides and lid. There was hardly
any other furniture in the large room, except casts, wooden
steps, easels and rough boxes, all festooned with cobwebs.
The next room was still larger, but it was also much
more crowded. Apparently Piei-o was keeping the Festa.
for the double door underneath the Avindow which admitted
the painter's light from above, was thrown open, and

180 KOMOLA.

showed a garden, or rather thicket, in which fig-trees and
vines grew in tangled trailing wildness among nettles and
hemlocks, and a tall cypress lifted its dark head from a
stifling mass of yellowish mulberry-leaves. It seemed as
if that dank luxuriance had begun to penetrate even within
the walls of the wide and lofty room; for in one corner,
amidst a confused heap of carved marble fragments and
rusty armor, tuits of long grass and dark featTiery fennel
had made their way, and a large stone vase, tilted on one
side, seemed to be pouring out the ivy that streamed around.
All about the walls hung pen and oil sketches of fantastic
sea-monsters; dances of satyrs and maenads; Saint Mar-
garet's resurrection out of the devouring dragon; Madon-
nas with the supernal light upon them; studies of plants
and grotesque heads; and on irregular rough shelves a few
books were scattered among great drooj)ing bunches of corn,
bullocks' horns, pieces of dried honeycomb, stones with
patches of rare-colored lichen, skulls and bones, peacocks'
feathers, and large birds' wings. Rising from amongst
the dirty litter of the floor were lay figures: one in the
frock of a Vallombrosan monk, strangely surmounted by a
helmet with barred visor, another smothered with brocade
and skins hastily tossed over it. Amongst this hetero-
geneous still life, several speckled and white pigeons were
perched or strutting, too tame to fly at the entrance of
men; three corpulent toads were crawling in an intimate
friendly way near the door-stone; and a white rabbit,
apparently the model for that which was frightening Cupid
in the picture of Mars and Venus placed on the central
easel, was twitching its nose with much content on a box
full of bran.

"And now, Messer Greco," said Piero, making a sign to
Tito that he might sit down on a low stool near the door,
and then standing over him with folded arms, "don't be
trying to see everything at once, like Messer Domeneddio,
but let me know how large you would have this same
triptych."

Tito indicated the required dimensions, and Piero
marked them on a piece of paper.

"And now for the book," said Piero, reaching down a
manuscript volume.

"There's nothing about the Ariadne there," said Tito,
giving him the passage; "but you will remember I want
the crowned Ariadne by tlie side of the young Bacchus:
she must have golden hair."

THE PORTRAIT. 181

*'Ha!" said Piero, abruptly, pushing up his lips again.
"And you want them to be" likenesses, eh?" he added,
looking down into Tito's face.

Tito laughed and blushed. ''I know you are great at
portraits,, Messer Piero; but I could not ask Ariadne to sit
for 3'ou, because the painting is a secret."

" There it is! I want her to sit to me. Giovanni Ves-
pucci M'ants me to paint him a picture of CEdipus and
Antigone at Colonos, as he has expounded it to me: I have
a fancy for the subject, and I want Bardo and his daughter
to sit for it. Now, you ask them; and then I'll put the
likeness into Ariadne."

"Agreed, if I can prevail with them. And your price
for the Bacchus and Ariadne?"

"Baie! If you get them to let me paint them, that will
pay me. I'd rather not have your money: you may pay
for the case."

"And when shall I sit for yon?" said Tito; "for if we
have one likeness, we must have two."

"I don't want your likeness; I've got it already," said
Piero, "only I've made you look frightened. I must take
the fright out of it for Bacchus."

As he was speaking, Piero laid down the book and went
to look among some paintings, propped with their faces
against the wall. He returned with an oil-sketch in his
hand.

" I call this as good a bit of portrait as I ever did," he
said, looking at it as he advanced. "Your's is a face
that expresses fear well, because it's naturally a bright
one. I noticed it the first time I saw you. The rest of
the picture is hardly sketched; but I've painted ijoti in
thoroughly."

Piero turned the sketch and held it toward Tito's eyes.
He saw Jiimself with his right hand uplifted, holding a
wine-cup, in the attitude of triumphant joy, but with his
face turned away from the cuj) with an expression of such
intense fear in the dilated eyes and pallid lips, that he felt
a cold stream through his veins, as if he were being thrown
into sympathy with his imaged self.

"You are beginning to look like it already," said Piero,
with a short laugh, moving the picture away "again. "He's
seeing a ghost — that fine young man, 1 shall finish it
some day, when I've settled what sort of ghost is the most
terrible — whether it should look solid, like a dead man ■
come to life, or half transparent, like a mist."

183 ROMOLA.

Tito rather ashamed of himself for a sudden sensitive-
ness strangely opposed to his usual easy self-command, said
carelessly —

" That is a subject after your own heart, Messer Piero
— a revel interrupted by a ghost. You seem to love the
blending of the terrible with the gay. I suppose that is
the reason your shelves are so well furnished with death's-
heads, while you are painting those roguish Loves who are
running away with the armor of Mars. I begin to think
you are a Cynic philosopher in the pleasant disguise of a
cunning painter."

"Not I, Messer Greco; a philosopher is the last sort of
anim;d I should choose to resemble. I find it enough to
live, without spinning lies to account for life. Fowls
cackle, asses bray, women chatter, and pliilosophers spin
false reasons — that's the effect the sight of the world brings
out of them. Well, I am an animal that paints instead of
cackling, or braying, or spinning lies. And now, I think,
our business is done; 3'ou'n keep to your side of the bar-
gain about the Qildipus and Antigone? "

"I will do my best," said Tito — on this strong hint,
immediately moving toward the door.

'' And you'll let me know at ISTello's. No need to come
here again."

*'T understand," said Tito, laughingly, lifting his hand
in sign of friendly parting.

CHAPTER XIX.

THE OLD man's HOPE.

Messer Bernardo del Nero was as inexorable as
Pomola had expected in his advice that the marriage
should be deferred till Easter, and in this matter Bardo
was entirely under the ascendancy of his sagacious and
practical friend. Nevertheless, Bernardo himself, though
lie was as far as ever from any susceptibility to the
]icrsonal fascination in Tito which was felt by others,
could not altogether resist that argument of success which
is always powerful with men of the world. Tito was
making his way rapidly in high quarters. He was
especially growing in favor with the young Cardinal

THE OLD man's HOPE. 183

Giovanni de' Medici, who had even sjioken of Tito's
forming part of his learned retinue on an approaching
•journey to Eome; and the bright young Greek who had
a tongue that was always ready without ever being
quarrelsome, was more and more wished for at gay
suppers in the Via Larga, and at Florentine games in
which he had no pretension to excel, and could admire the
incomparable skill of Piero de' Medici in the most graceful
manner in the world. By an unfailing sequence, Tito's
reputation as an agreeable companion in "magnificent"
society made his learning and talent appear more lustrous:
and he was really accomplished enough to prevent an exag-
gerated estimate from being hazardous to him. Messer
Bernardo had old prejudices and attachments which now
began to argue down the newer and feebler prejudice
against the young Greek stranger who was rather too sup-
ple. To the old Florentine it was impossible to despise
the recommendation of standing well with the best Floren-
tine _ families, and since Tito began to be thoroughly
received into that circle whose views were the unquestioned
standard of social value, it seemed irrational not to admit
that there was no longer any check to satisfaction in the
prospect of such a son-in-law for Bardo, and such a husband
for Eomola. It was undeniable that Tito's coming had
been the dawn of a new life for both father and daughter,
and the first promise had even been surpassed. The blind
old scholar — whose proud truthfulness would never enter
into that commerce of feigned and preposterous admira-
tion which, varied by a corresponding measurelessuess in
vituperation, made the woof of all learned intercourse —
had fallen into neglect even among his fellow-citizens, and
when he was alluded to at all, it had long been usual to say
that, though his blindness and the loss of his son were
pitiable misfortunes, he was tiresome in contending for the
value of his own labors; and that his discontent was a
little inconsistent in a man who had been openly regardless
of religious rites, and who in days past had refused offers
made to him from various quarters, on the slight condition
that he would take orders, without which it was not easy
for patrons to provide for every scholar. But since Tito's
coming, there was no longer the same monotony in the
thought that Bardo's name suggested; the old man, it was
understood, had left off his plaints, and the fair daughter
was no longer to be shut up in dowerless pride, waiting for
Skjiarentado. The winning manners and growing favor of

184 ROMOLA.

the handsome Greek who was expected to enter into the
double relation of son and husband helped to make the
new interest a thoroughly friendly one, and it was no
longer a rare occurrence when a visitor enlivened the quiet
library. Elderly men came from that indefinite prompting
to renew former intercourse which arises when an old
acquaintance begins to be newly talked about; and young
men whom Tito had asked leave to bring once, found it
easy to go again when they overtook him on his way to
the Via de Bardi, and resting their hands on his shoulder,
fell into easy chat with him. For it was pleasant to look
at Romola's beauty; to see her, like old Firenzuola's type
of womanly majesty, '^sitting with a certain grandeur,
speaking with gravity, smiling with modesty, and casting
around, as it were, an odor of queenliness;"* and she
seemed to unfold like a strong white lily under this genial
breath of admiration and homage; it was all one to her
with her new bright life in Tito's love.

Tito had even been the means of strengthening the hope
in Bardo's mind that he might before his death receive the
longed-for security concerning his library: that it should
not be merged in another collection; that it should not be
transferred to a body of monks, and be called by the name
of a monastery; but that it should remain forever the
Bardi Library^ for the use of Florentines. For the old
habit of trusting in the Medici could not die out while
their influence was still the strongest lever in the State;
and Tito, once possessing the ear of the Cardinal Giovanni
de' Medici, might do more even than Messer Bernardo
toward winning the desired interest, for he could demon-
strate to a learned audience the peculiar value of Bardi's
collection. Tito himself talked sanguinely of such a
result, willing to cheer the old man, and conscious that
Eomola repaid those gentle words to her father with a sort
of adoration that no direct tribute to herself could have
won from her.

This question of the library was the subject of more
than one discussion with Bernardo del Nero when Christ-
mas was turned and the prospect of the marriage was
l)ecoming near — but always out of Bardo's hearing. For
Bardo nursed a vague belief, which they dared not disturb,
that his property, apart from the library, was adequate to

* " Qnando una donna 6 [grande, ben f orraata, porta ben sua persona,
siede con una vcvtti ofrandozzii, parla con gravitA, ride con modt/stia, e final-
niciite frotta (juasi un odor di Regina; allora noi diciano quella donua pare
una maesta, ella ha una maesta,"— Firemzuola : Dolla. BdXezza rteWe Donne.

THE OLD man's HOPE. 185

meet all demands. He would not even, except nnder a
momentary pressure of angry despondency, admit to him-
self that the will by which he had disinherited Dino would
leave Romola the heir of nothing but debts; or that he
needed anything from patronage beyond the security that
a separate locality should be assigned to his library, in
return for a deed of gift by which he made it over to the
Florentine Republic.

''My opinion is," said Bernardo to Romola, in a consul-
tation they had under the loggia, " that since you are to
be married, and Messer Tito will have a competent income,
we should begin to wind up the affairs, and ascertain
exactly the sum that would be necessary to save the library
from being touched, instead of letting the debts accumu-
late any longer. Your father needs nothing but his shred
of mutton and his macaroni every day, and I think Messer
Tito may engage to supply that for the years that remain;
he can let it be in pla9e of the mo r gen-cap."

"Tito has always known that my life is bound up with
my father's," said Romola; "and he is better to my father
than I am: he delights in making him haiDpy."

"Ah, he's not made of the same clay as other men, is
he?" said Bernardo, smiling. "Thy father has thought
of shutting woman's folly out of thee by cramming thee
with Greek and Latin; but thou hast been as ready to
believe in the first pair of bright eyes and the first soft
words that have come within reach of thee, as if thou
couldst say nothing by heart but Paternosters, like other
Christian men's daughters."

"Now, Godfather," said Romola, shaking her head
playfully, " as if it were only bright eyes and soft words
that made me love Tito! You know better. You know I
love my father and you because you are both good, and
I love Tito too because he is so good. I see it, I feel it,
in everything he says and does. And if he is handsome,
too, why should I not love him the better for that? It
seenis to me beauty is part of the finished language by
which goodness speaks. You know you must have been
a very handsome youth, godfather" — she looked up with
one of her happy, loving smiles at the stately old man —
"you were about as tall as Tito, and you had very fine
eyes; only you looked a little sterner and prouder,
and "

"And Romola likes to have all the pride to herself?"
said Bernardo, not inaccessible to this pretty coaxing.

186 ROMOLA.

''However, it is well that in one way Tito's demands are
more modest than those of any Florentine husband of
fitting rank that we should have been likely to find for
you; he wants no dowry."

So it was settled in that way between Messer Bernardo
del ISTero, Romola, and Tito. Bardo assented with a wave
of the hand when Bernardo told him that he thought it
would be Avell now to begin to sell property and clear off
debts; being accustomed to think of debts and property
as a sort of thick wood that his imagination never even
penetrated, still less got beyond. And Tito set about
winning Messer Bernardo's respect by inquiring, with his
ready faculty, into Florentine money-matters, the secrets
of the Monti or public funds, the values of real property,
and the profits of banking.

''You will soon forget that Tito is not a Florentine,
godfather," said Romola. "See how he is learning every-
thing about Florence."

"It seems to me he is one of the demoni, who are of no
particular country, child," said Bernardo, smiling. "His
mind is a little too nimble to be weighted with all the
stuff we men carry about in our hearts."

Eomola smiled too in happy confidence.

CHAPTER XX.

THE DAY OF THE BETROTHA.L.

It was the last week of the Carnival, and the streets of
Florence M'ere at their fullest and noisiest: there were the
masked processions, chanting songs, indisjtensible now they
had once been introduced by Lorenzo the Magnificent; there
was the favorite rigoletto, or round dance, footed "in
piazza" under the blue frosty sky; there were practical
jokes of all sorts, from throwing comfits to throwing
stones — especially stones. For the boys and strii)lings,
always a strong element in Florentine crowds, became at
the height of Carnival time as loud and unmanageable as
tree-crickets, and it was their immemorial privilege to bar
the way with polos to all passengers, until a tribute had
been paid toward furnishing those lovers of strong sensa-
tions with suppers and bonfires: to conclude with the

THE DAY OF THE BETKOTHAL. 187

standing entertainment of stone-throwing, which was not
entirely monotonous, since the consequent maiming was
various, and it was not always a single person who was killed.
J5o that the pleasures of the Carnival were of a checkered
kind, and if a painter were called upon to represent them
truly he would have to make a picture in which there
would be so much grossness and barbarity that it must be
turned with its face to the wall, except when it was taken
down for the grave historical puri)ose of justifying a
reforming zeal which, in ignorance of the facts, might be
unfairly condemned for its narrowness. Still there was
much of that more innocent picturesque merriment which
IS never wanting among a people with quick animal spirits
and sensitive organs: there was not the heavy sottishness
which belongs to the thicker northern blood, nor the steal-
thy fierceness which, in the more southern regions of the
peninsular, makes the brawl lead to the dagger-thrust.

It was the high morning, but the merry spirits of 'the
Carnival were still inclined to lounge and recapitulate the
last night s jests, when Tito Melema was walking at a brisk
pace on t^ie way to the Via de Bardi. Young Bernardo
JJoviz, who now looks at us out of Eaphael's portrait as
the keen-eyed Cardaial da Bibbiena, was with him: and
as they went they held animated talk about some subject
that had evidently no relation to the sights and sounds
through which they were i)ushing their way along the For
banta Maria. Xevertheless, as they discussed, smiled, and
gesticulated, they both, from time to time, cast quick
glances around them, and at the turning toward the Luno-
Arno, leading to the Ponte Rubaconte, Tito had becom?
aware, m one of these rapid surveys, that there was some
one not far off him by whom he very much desired not to be
recognized at that moment. His time and thoughts were
thoroLiglily preoccupied, for he was looking forward to a
unique occasion in his life: he was preparing for his
betrothal, which was to take place on the evening of this
very day. The ceremony had been resolved upon rather
sucttlenly; for although preparations toward the marriage
Had been going forward for some time — chiefly in the
application of Tito's florins to the fitting up of rooms in
Bardo s dwelling, which, the library excepted, had always
been scantily furnished— it had been intended to defer
, n?-^ betrothal and the marriage until after Easter,
when iitos yearof probation, insisted on by Bernardo del
rsero, would have been complete. But when an express

188 EOMOLA.

proposition had come, that Tito should follow the Car-
dinal Giovanni to Rome to help Bernardo Dovizi with his
superior knowledge of Greek in arranging a library, and
there was no possibility of declining what lay so plainly on
the road to advancement, he had become urgent in his
entreaties that the betrothal might take place before his
departure: there would be the less delay before the mar-
riage on his return, and it would l)e less painful to part if
he and Romola were outwardly as well as inwardly pledged
to each other — if he had a claim which defied Messer Ber-
nardo or any one else to nullify it. For the betrothal, at
which rings were exchanged and mutual contracts were
signed, made more than half the legality of the marriage,
to be completed on a separate occasion by the nuptial Ijene-
diction. Romola's feelings had met Tito^s in this wish,
and the consent of the elders had been won.

And now Tito was hastening, amidst arrangements for
his departure the next day, to snatch a morning visit to
Romola, to say and hear any last words that are needful to
be said before their meeting for the betrothal in the even-
ing. It was not a time when any recognition could be
pleasant that Avas at all likely to detain him; still less a
recognition by Tessa. And it was unmistakably Tessa
whom he had caught sight of, moving along with a timid
and forlorn look, toward that very turn of the Lung
Arno which he was just rounding. As he continued his
talk with the young Dovizi, he had an uncomfortable
undercurrent of consciousness which told him that Tessa
liad seen him and would certainly follow him: there was
no escaping her along this direct road by the Arno, and
over the Ponte Rubaconte. But she would not dare to
speak to him or approach him while he was not alone, and
he would continue to keep Dovizi with him till they reached
Bardo's door. He quickened his pace, and took up new
threads of talk, but all the while the sense that Tessa was
behind him, though he had no physical evidence of the
fact, grew stronger and stronger; it was very irritating —
perhaps all the more so because a certain tenderness and
pity for the poor little thing made the determination to
escape without any visible notice of her, a not altogether
agreeable resource. Yet Tito ]iersevered and carried his
companion to the door, cleverly managing his "addio*"
without turning his face in the direction where it was pos-
sible for him to see an importunate })aii of L-lne eyes; and
as he went up the stone steps, he tried to get rid of

THE DAY OF THE BETROTHAL. 189

unpleasant thoughts by saying to himself that after all
lessa might not have seen him, or, if she had, might not
ha.ve followed him. ^

But— perhaps because that possibility could not be relied
on strongly — when the visit was over, he came out of the
doorway with a quick step and an air of unconsciousness
as to anything that might be on his right hand or his left
Uur eyes are so constructed, however, that they take in a
wide angle without asking any leave of our will; and Tito
knew that there was a little figure in a white hood standing
near the doorway — knew it quite well, before he felt a
hand laid on his arm. It was a real grasp, and not a lio-ht,
timid touch; for poor Tessa, seeing his rapid step, had
started forward with a desperate eifort. But when he
stopped and turned toward her, her face wore a frightened
look, as if she dreaded the effect of her boldness

'^ Tessa! "said Tito, with more sharimess in his voice
than she had ever heard in it before. " Why are you here '
lou must not follow me— you must not stand about door-
places Avaitmg for me."

Her blue eyes widened with tears, and she said nothing,
lito was afraid of something worse than ridicule, if he
were seen m the Via de Bardi with a girlish contadina
looking pathetically at him. It was a street of hio-h
silent-lookmg dwellings, not of traffic; but Bernardo del
N ero, or some one a most as dangerous, might come up at any
moment Even if it had not been the day of his betrothal,
the incident would have been awkward and annoying. Yet
It would be brutal -it was impossible to drive Tessa away
with harsh words. That accursed folly of his with thi
c^rretano — t\x^t it should have lain buried in a quiet way
tor months and now start up before him as this unseason-
able crop of vexation! He could not speak harshly, but he
spoke hurriedly.

''Tessa I cannot — must not talk to vou here. I will
flowf "° "^^^ ^"^^ ^^'^ ^°'' ^'°^ *^®''®- ^°^^°'^ "^e

He turned and walked fast to the Ponte Rubaconte, and
there leaned against the wall of one of the quaint little
houses that rise at even distances on the bridge, looking
toward the way by which Tessa would come. It would
have softened a much harder heart than Tito's to see the
«Sf *'",^^g/'^c^^ancing with her round face much paled and
saddened since he had parted from it at the door of the
^unziata. Happily it was the least frequented of the

190 ROMOLA.

bridges, and there were scarcely any passengers on it at
this moment. He lost no time in speaking as soon as she
came near him.

" Now, Tessa, I have very little time. You must not
cry. Why did you follow me this morning? You must
not do so again."

"I thought," said Tessa, speaking in a whisper, and
struggling against a sob that would rise immediately at
this new voice of Tito's — I thought you wouldn't be so
long before you came to take care of me again. And the
patrigiio beats me, and I can't bear it any longer. And
always when I come for a holiday I walk about to find you,
and I can't. Oh, please don't send me away from you
again! It has been so long, and I cry so now, because you
never come to me. I can't help it, for the days are so
long, and I don't mind about the goats and kids, or any-
thing— and I can't "

The sobs came fast now, and the great tears. Tito felt
that he could not do otherwise than comfort her. Send
her away — yes; that he 7nust do, at once. But it was all
the more impossible to tell her anything that M'ould leave
her in a state of hopeless grief. He saw new trouble in
the background, but the difficulty of the moment was too
pressing for him to weigh distant consequences.

" Tessa, my little one," he said, in his old caressing
tones, " you must not cry. Bear with the cross patrigno a
little longer. I will come back to you. But I'm going
now to Eome — a long, long way off. I shall come back in
a few weeks, and then I promise you to come and see you.
Promise me to be good and wait for me.''

It was the Avell-remembered voice again, and the mere
sound was half enough to soothe Tessa. She looked up at
him with trusting eyes, that still glittered with tears, sob-
bing all the while, in spite of her utmost efforts to obey
him. Again he said in a gentle voice —

"Promise me, my Tessa."

"Yes," she whispered. " But you won't be long?"

"No, not long. But I must go now. And remember
what I told you, Tessa. Nobody must know that you
ever see me, else you will lose me forever. And now,
when I have left you, go straight home, and never follow
me again. Wait till I come to you. Good-bye, my little
Tessa: I will come."

There was no help for it; he must turn and leave her
without looking behind him to see how she bore it, for

THR DAY OP THE BETROTHAL. 191

he had no time to spare. When he did look around he
was m the Via de Benci, where there was no seeing what
was happening on the bridge; but Tessa was too trusting
and obedient not to do just what he had told her.

Yes, the difficulty was at an end for that dav; yet this
return of Tessa to him, at a moment when it M'as impossi-
ble for him to put an end to all difficulty with her by
undeceiving her. was an unpleasant incident to carry in
his memory. But Tito's mind was just now thoroughly
penetrated with a hopeful first love, associated with all
happy prospects flattering to his ambition; and that future
necessity of grieving Tessa could be scarcely more to him
than the far-off cry of some little suffering animal buried
in the thicket, to a merry cavalcade in the sunny plain
W lien, for the second time that day, Tito was hastening
across the Ponte Rubaconte, the thought of Tessa caused
no perceptible diminution of his happiness. He was well
muffled m his mantle, less, perhaps to protect him from
the cold than from the additional notice that would have
been drawn upon him by his dainty apparel. He leaped
up the stone steps by two at a time, and said hurriedly to
Maso, niio met him —

''Where is the damigella?"

''In the library; she is quite ready, and Monna Brigada
and Messer Bernardo are already there with Ser Braccio
but none of the rest of the company." '

"Ask lier to give me a few minutes alone; I will await
her m the salotto."

Tito entered a room which had been fitted up in the
utmost contrast with the half-pallid, half-sombre tints
o± the library. The walls were brightly frescoed with
* caprices of nymphs and loves sporting under the blue
among flowers and birds. The only furniture besides the
red leather seats and the central table were two tall white
vases, and a young faun playing the flute, modelled by a
promising youth named Michelangelo Buonarotti. It was
a room that gave a sense of being in the sunny open air.

iito kept his mantle round him, and looked toward the
door. It was not long before Romola entered, all white
m gold, more than ever like a tall lily. Her white silk
garment was bound by a golden girdle, which fell with
large tassels; and above that was the rippling gold of her
hair surmounted by the white mist of her long veil, which
was fastened on her brow by a band of pearls, the gift of

192 ROMOLA.

Bernardo del Nero, and was now parted off her face so
that it all floated backward.

" Eegina mial" said Tito, as he took her hand and
kissed it, still keeping his mantle round )iim. He could
not help going backward to look at her again, while she
stood in calm delight, with that exquisite self-conscious-
ness which rises under the gaze of admiring love.

"Romola, will you show me the next room now?" said
Tito, checking himself with the remembrance that the
time might be short. "You said I should see it when you
had arranged everything."

Without speaking, she led the way into a long narrow
room, painted brightly like the other, but only with birds
and flowers. The furniture in it was all old; there were
old faded objects for feminine use or ornament, arranged
in an open cabinet between the two narrow windows;
above the cabinet was the portrait of Eomola^s mother;
and below this, on the top of the cabinet, stood the crucifix
which Romola had brought from San Marco.

''I have brought something under my mantle," said
Tito, smiling; and throwing off the large loose garment,
he showed the little tabernacle which had been i:)ainted by
Piero di Cosimo. The painter had carried out Tito's
intention charmingly, and so far had atoned for his long
delay. "Do you know what this is for, my Eomola?"
added Tito, taking her by the hand, and leading her
toward the cabinet. "It is a little shrine, which is to
hide away from you forever that remembrancer of sad-
ness. You have done with sadness now; and we will bury
all images of it — bury them in a tomb of joy. See!"

A slight quiver passed across Romola's face as Tito took
hold of the crucifix. But she had no wish to prevent his
purpose; on the contrary, she herself wished to subdue
certain importunate memories and questionings which
still flitted like unexplained shadows across her happier
thought.

He opened the triptych and placed the crucifix within
the central space; then closing it again, taking out the
key, and setting the little tabernacle in the spot where the
crucifix had stood, said —

"Now, Romola, look and see if you are satisfied with
the portraits old Piero has made of us. Is it not a dainty
device? and the credit of choosing it is mine."

"Ah! it is you — it is perfect!" said Romola, looking
with moist joyful eyes at the miniature Bacchus, with his

THE DAY OF THE BETROTHAL. 193

purple clusters. " And I am Ariadne, and you are crown-
ing me! Yes. it is true, Tito; you have crowned my poor
life."

They held each other's hands while she spoke, and both
looked at their imaged selves. But the reality was far
more beautiful; she all lily-white and golden, and he with
his dark glowing beauty above the purple red-bordered
tunic.

"And it was our good strange Piero who painted it?"
said Romola. '' Did you put it into his head to paint me
as Antigone, that he might have my likeness for this?"

" No, it was he who made my getting leave for him to
paint you and your father, a condition of his doing this
for me."

"Ah! I see now what it was you gave up your precious
ring for. I perceived you had some cunning plan to give
me j)leasure."

Tito did not blench. Romola's little illusions about
himself had long ceased to cause him anything but satis-
faction. He only smiled and said —

"I might have spared my ring; Piero will accept no
money from me; he thinks himself j^a^id by painting you.
And now, while 1 am away, you will look every day at
those pretty s3-mbols of our life together — the ship on the
calm sea, and the ivy that never withers, and those Loves
that have left off wounding us and shower soft petals that
are like our kisses; and the leopards and tigers, they are
the troubles of your life that are all quelled now; and the
strange sea-monsters, with their merry eyes — let us see —
they are the dull passages in the heavy books, which have
begun to be amusing since we have sat by each other."

"Tito mio!" said Romola, in a half-laughing voice of
love; "but you will give me the key?" she added, holding
out her hand for it.

"Not at all!" said Tito, with playful decision, opening
his scarsella and dropping in the little key. "I shall
drown it in the Arno."

"But if I ever wanted to look at the crucifix again?"

"Ah! for that very reason it is hidden — hidden by these
images of youth and joy."

He pressed a light kiss on her brow, and she said no
more, ready to su])mit, like all strong souls, when she felt
no valid reason for resistance.

And then they joined the waiting company, which made
a dignified little procession as it passed along the Ponte
13

194 ROMOLA.

Kubaconte toward Santa Croce. Slowly it passed, for
Bardo, unaccustomed for years to leave his own house,
walked with a more timid step than usual; and that slow
pace suited well with the gouty dignity of Messer Barto-
lommeo Scala, who graced the occasion by his presence,
along with his daughter Alessandra. It was customary to
have very long, troops of kindred and friends at the
sposalzio, or betrothal, and it had even been found neces-
sary in time past to limit the number by law to no more
than four hundred — two hundred on each side; foi- since
the guests were all feasted after this initial ceremony, as
well as after the nozze, or marriage, the very first stage of
matrimony had become a ruinous expense, as that scholarly
Benedict, Leonardo Bruno, complained in his own case.
But Bardo, who in his poverty had kept himself proudly
free from any appearance of claiming the advantages
attached to a powerful family name, would have no invi-
tations given on the strength of mere friendship; and the
modest proccsssion of twenty that followed the sposi were,
with three 0/ four exceptions, friends of Bardo^s and Tito's
selected on personal grounds.

Bernardo del ISTero walked as a vanguard before Bardo,
who was led on the right by Tito, while Komola held her
father's other hand. Bardo had himself been married at
Santa Croce, and had insisted on Komola's being be-
trothed and married there, rather than in the little church
of Santa Lucia close by their house, because he had a
complete mental vision of the grand church where he
hoped that a burial might be granted him among the
Florentines who had deserved well. Hapj)ily the way was
short and direct, and lay aloof from the loudest riot of
the Carnival, if only they could return before any dances
or shows began in the great piazza of Santa Croce. The
west was red as they passed the bridge, and shed a mellow
light on the pretty procession, which had a toucii of
solemnity in the presence of the blind father. But when
the ceremony was over, and Tito and Romola came out on
to the broad steps of the church, with the golden links of
destiny on their fingers, the evening had deepened into
struggling starlight, and the servants had their torches lit.

While they came out, a strange dreary chant, as of a
Miserere, met their ears, and they saw that at the extreme
end of the piazza there seemed to be a stream of people
impelled by something approaching from the Borgo de
(I reel.

THE DAY OF THE BETROTHAL. 195

''It is one of their masked processions, I suppose,"
said Tito, who was now alone with Romola, while Ber-
nardo took charge of Bardo.

And as he spoke there came slowly into view, at a height
far above the heads of the on-lookers, a huge and ghastlv
image of Winged Time with his scythe and hour-glass,
surrounded by his winged children, the Hours. He was
mounted on a high car completely covered with black, and
the bullocks that drew the car were also covered with
black, their horns alone standing out white above the
gloom;- so that in the sombre shadow of the houses it
seemed to those at a distance as if Time and his children
were apparitions floating through the air. And behind
them came what looked like a troop of the sheeted dead
gliding above blackness. And as they glided slowly, they
chanted in a wailing strain.

A cold horror seized on Romola, for at the first moment
it seemed as if her brother's vision, which could never be
effaced from her mind, was being half-fulfilled. She
clung to Tito, Avho, divining what Avas in her thoughts,
said —

" What dismal fooling sometimes pleases your Floren^
tines! Doubtless this is an invention of Piero di Cosimo,
who loves such grim merriment."

" Tito, I wish it had not happened. It will deepen the
images of that vision which I would fain be rid of."

"'Nay, Romola, you will look only at the images of our
happiness now. I have locked all sadness away from you."

"But it is still there — it is only hidden," said Romola,
in a low tone, hardly conscious that she spoke.

"See, they are all gone now!" said Tito. "You will
forget this ghastly mummery when we are in the light,
and can see each other's eyes. My Ariadne must never
look backward now — only forward to Easter, when she will
triumph with her Care-dispeller."

BOOK II.
CHAPTEE XXL

FLOKENCE EXPECTS A GUEST. \

It was the seventeenth of November 1494: more than
eighteen months since Tito and Romola had been finally
nnited in the joyous Easter time, and had had a rainbow-
tinted shower of comfits thrown over them, after the
ancient Grreek fashion, in token that the heavens would
shower sweets on them through all their double life.

Since that Easter a great change had come over the
prospects of Florence; and as in the tree that bears a
myriad of blossoms, each single bud with its fruit is
dependent on the primary circulation of the sap, so the
fortunes of Tito and Eomola were dependent on certain
grand political and social conditions which made an epoch
in the history of Italy.

In this very November, little more than a week ago, the
spirit of the old centuries seemed to have re-entered the
breasts of Florentines. The great bell in the palace tower
had rung out the hammer-sound of alarm, and the people
had mustered with their rusty arms, their tools and
impromptu cudgels, to drive out the Medici. The gate
of San Gallo had been fairly shut on the arrogant, exas-
perating Piero, galloping away toward Bologna with his
hired horsemen frightened behind him, and shut on his
keener young brother, the cardinal, escaping in the disguise - ■
of a Franciscan monk: a price had been set on both their
heads. After that, there had been some sacking of houses,
according to old precedent; the ignominious images, painted
on the public buildings, of men who had consi^ired against
the Medici in days gone by, were effaced; the exiled enemies
of the Medici were invited home. The half-fledged tyrants
Avere fairly out of their splendid nest in the Via Larga,
and the Eepublic had recovered the use of its will again.

But now, a week later, the great palace in the Via Larga
had been prepared for the reception of another tenant;
and if drapery roofing the streets with unwonted color, if

196

FLOKEXCE EXPECTS A fiTEST. 197

banners and hangings poured out of the windows, if carpets
and tapestry stretched over all steps and pavement on
which exceptional feet might tread, were an unquestion-
able proof of joy, Florence was joyful in the expectation
of its nev," guest. The stream of color flowed from the
palace in the A"ia Larga round by the Cathedral, then by
the great Piazza della Signoria, and across the Ponte Vec-
eliio to the Porta San Frediano — the gate that looks toward
Pisa. There, near the gate, a platform and canopy had
been erected for the Signoria; and Messer Luca Corsini,
doctor of law, felt his heart palpitating a little with the
sense that he had a Latin oration to read; and every chief
elder in Florence had to make himself ready, with smooth
chin and well-lined silk lucco, to walk in procession; and
tlie well-born youths were looking at their rich new tunics
after the French mode which was to impress the stranger
as having a peculiar grace when worn by Florentines; and
a large body of the clergy, from the archbishop in his
effulgence to the train of monks, black, white, and gray,
were consulting betimes in the morning how they should
marshal themselves, with their burden of relics and sacred
banners and consecrated jewels, that their movements
might be adjusted to the expected arrival of the illustrious
visitor, at three o'clock in the afternoon.

An unexampled visitor I For he had come through the
passes of the AIjds with such an army as Italy had not seen
before ; with thousands of terrible Swiss, well used to fight
for love and hatred as well as for hire ; with a host of
gallant cavaliers proud of a name ; with an unprecedented
infantry, in which every man in an hundred carried an
arquebus; nay, with cannon of bronze, shooting not stones
but iron balls, drawn not by bullocks but by horses, and
capable of firing a second time before a city could mend
the breach made by the first ball. Some compared the
new-comer to Charlemagne, reputed rebuilder of Florence,
welcome concjuorer of degenerate kings, regulator and
benefactor of the Church ; some preferred the comparison
to Cyrus, liberator of the chosen people, restorer of the
Tenqole. For he had come across the Alps with the most
glorious projects ; he was to march through' Italy amidst
the jubilees of a grateful and admiring people ; he was to
satisfy all conflicting complaints at Rome ; he was to take
possession, by virtue of hereditary right and a little fight-
ing, of the kingdom of Naples : and from that convenient
starting-point he was to set out on the conquest of the

198 ROMOLA.

Turks, who were partly to be cut to pieces and partly con-
verted to the faith of Christ, It was a scheme that seemed
to befit the Most Christian King, head of a nation which,
thanks to the devices of a subtile Louis the Eleventh who
had died in much fright as to his personal prospects ten
years before, had become the strongest of Christians mon-
archies ; and this antitype of Cyrus and Charlemagne was
no other than the son of that subtle Louis — the young
Charles the Eighth of France.

Surely, on a general statement, hardly anvthing could
seem more grandiose, or fitter to revive in the breasts of
men the memory of great dispensations by which new
strata had been laid in the history of mankind. And
there was a very widely spread conviction that the advent
of the French king and his army into Italy was one of
those events at which marble statues might well be believed
to,perspire, phantasmal fiery warriors to fight in the air,
and quadrupeds to bring forth monstrous births — that it
did not belong to the usual order of Providence, but was
in a i)eculiar sense the work of God. It Avas a conviction
that rested less on the necessarily momentous character of
a powerful foreign invasion than on certain moral emotions
to which the aspect of the times gave the form of jire-
sentiments: emotions which had found a very remarkable
utterance in the voice, of a single man.

That man was Era Girolamo Savonarola, Prior of the
Dominican convent of San Marco, in Florence. On a Sep-
tember morning, when men's cars were ringing with the
news that the French army had entered Italy, he had
preached in the Cathedral of Florence from ' the text,
"Behold I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the
earth." lie believed it was by supreme guidance that he
had reached just so far in his exposition of Genesis the
previous Lent; and he believed the "flood of water" —
emblem at once of avenging wrath and purifying mercy —
to be the divinely-indicated symbol of the French army.
His audience, some of whom were held to be among the
choicest spirits of the age — the most cultivated men in the
most ^ cultivated of Italian cities — believed it too, and
listened Avich shuddering awe. For this man had a power
rarely paralleled of impressing his beliefs on others, and of
swaying very various minds. And as long as four years
ago he had proclaimed from the chief pulpit of Florence
that a scourge was about to descend on Italy, and that by
this scourge the Church was to be purified. Savonarola

FLORENCE EXPECTS A GTTEST. 199

appeared to believe, and his hearers more or less waver-
ingly believed, that he had a mission like that of the
Hebrew prophets, and that the Florentines amongst whom
his message was delivered, were in some sense a second
chosen people. The idea of prophetic gifts was not a
remote one in that age: seers of visions, circumstantial
heralds of things to be were far from uncommon, either
outside or inside the cloister; but this very fact made
Savonarola stand out the more conspicuously as a grand
exception. While in others tlie gift of projihecy was very
much like a farthing candle illuminating smaircorners of
human destiny with prophetic gossip, in Savonarola it was
like a mighty beacon shining far out for the warning and
guidance of men. And to some of the soberest minds the
supernatural character of his insight into the future
gathered a strong attestation from tlie peculiar conditions
of the age.

At the close of 1492, the year in which Lorenzo de
Medici died and Tito Melema came as a wanderer to
Florence, Italy was enjoying a peace and prosperity un-
threatened by any near and definite danger. There was
no fear of famine, for the seasons had been plenteous in
corn, and wine, and oil; new palaces had been rising in
all fair cities, new villas on pleasant slopes and summits;
and the men who had more than their share of these good
things were in no fear of the large number who had less.
For the citizens' armor was getting rusty, and populations
seemed to have become tame, licking the hands of masters
who paid for a ready-made army when they wanted it, as
they paid for goods at Smyrna. Even the fear of the
Turk had ceased to be active, and the Pope found it more
immediately profitable to accept bribes from him for a
little prospective poisoning than to form jDlans either for
conquering or for converting him.

Altogether this world, with its partitioned empire and
its roomy universal Church, seemed to be a handsome
establishment for the few who were lucky or wise enough
to reap the advantages of human folly: a world in which
lust and obscenity, lying and treachery, oppression and
murder, were pleasant, useful, and, when properly man-
aged, not dangerous. And as a sort of fringe or adorn-
ment to the substantial delights of tyranny, avarice, and
lasciviousness, there was the patronage of polite learning
and the fine arts, so that flattery could always be had in the
choicest Latin to be commanded at that tirne, and sublime

5iOO BOMOLA.

artists were at hand to paint the holy and the unclean with
impartial skill. The Church, it was said, had never been
so disgraced in its head, had never shown so few signs of
renovating, vital belief in its lower members; nevertheless
it was much more prosperous than in some past days. The
heavens were fair and smiling above; and below there were
no signs of earthquake.

Yet at that time, as we have seen, there was a man in
Florence who for two years and more had been preaching
that a scourge was at hand; that the world was certainly
not framed for the lasting convenience of hypocrites, liber-
tines, and oppressors. From the midst of those smiling
heavens he had seen a sword hanging — the sword of God's
justice — which was speedily to descend with j-turifying
punishment on the Church and the world. In brilliant
Ferrara, seventeen years before, the contradiction between
men's lives and their professed beliefs had pressed upon
him with a force that had been enough to destroy his
apjoetite for the world, and at the age of twenty-three had
driven him into the cloister. He believed that God had
committed to the Church the sacred lamp of truth for the
guidance and salvation of men, and he saw that the
Church, in its corruption, had become a sepulchre to hide
the lamp. As the years went on scandals increased and
multiplied, and hypocrisy seemed to have given place to
impudence. Had the world, then, ceased to have a right-
eous Euler? Was the Church finally forsaken? Xo,
assuredly: in the Sacred Book there was a record of the
past in which might be seen as in a glass what would be in
the days to come, and the book sliowed that when tlie
wickedness of the chosen people, type of the Christian
CHiurch, had become crying, the judgments of God had
descended on them. Nay, reason itself declared that ven-
geance was imminent, for what else would suffice to turn
men from their obstinacy in evil? And unless the Church
were reclaimed, how could the promises be fulfilled, that
the heathens should be converted and the whole world
become subject to the one true law? He had seen his
belief reflected in visions — a mode of seeing which had
been frequent with him from his youth up.

But the real force of demonstration for Girolamo Savon-
arola lay in his own burning indignation at the sight of
wrong; in his fervent belief in an Unseen Justice that
would put an end to the wrong, and in an Unseen Purity
to whioli lying and uncleanness were an abomination. To

FLORENCE EXPECTS A GUEST. 201

his ardent, power-loving soul, believing in great ends, and
longing to achieve those ends by the exertion of its own
strong will, the faith in a supreme and righteous Ruler
became one with the faith in a speedy divine interposition
that would punish and reclaim.

Meanwhile, under that splendid masquerade of digni-
ties sacred and secular which seemed to make the life of
lucky Churchmen and princely families so luxurious and
amusing, there were certain conditions at work which slowly
tended to disturb the general festivity. Ludovico Sforza —
copious in gallantry, splendid patron of an incomi^arable
Leonardo da Vinci — holding the ducal crown of Milan in
his grasp, and wanting to put it on his own head rather
than let it rest on that of a feeble nephew who would take
very little to poison him, was much afraid of the Spanish-
born old King Ferdinand and the Crown Prince Alfonso
of Naples, who, not liking cruelty and treachery which
were useless to themselves, objected to the poisoning of a
near relative for the advantage of a Lombard usurper; the
royalties of Xaples again were afraid of their suzerain.
Pope Alexander Borgia; all three were anxiously watching
Florence, lest with its midway territory it should deter-
mine the game by underhand backing; and all four, with
every small state in Italy, were afraid of Venice — Venice
the cautious, the stable, and the strong, that wanted to
stretch its arms not only along both sides of the Adriatic
but across to the ports of the western coast.

Lorenzo de Medici, it was thought, did much to prevent
the fatal outbreak of such jealousies, keeping up the old
Florentine alliance with Naples and the Pope, and yet per-
suading Milan that the alliance was for the general advan-
tage. But young Piero de Medici's rash vanity had quickly
nullified the effect of his father's wary policy, and Ludovico
Sforza, roused to suspicion of a league against him, thought
of a move which would checkmate his adversaries: he deter-
mined to invite the French king to march into Italy, and,
as heir of the house of Anjou, take possession of Naples.
Ambassadors — "orators," as they were called in those har-
anguing times — went and came; a recusant cardinal, deter-
mined not to acknowledge a Pope elected by bribery (and
his own particular enemy), went and came also, and sec-
onded the invitation with hot rhetoric; and the young
king seemed to lend a willing ear. So that in 1493 the
rumor spread and became louder and louder that King
Charles VIII. of France was about to cross the Alps with a

202 KOMOLA.

mighty army; and the Italian poi^ulutions, accustomed,
since Italy had ceased to be the heart of the Roman empire,
to look for an arbitrator from afar, began vaguely to
regard his coming as a means of avenging their wrongs
and redressing their grievances.

And in that ramor Savonarola had heard the assurance
that his prophecy was being verified. What was it that
filled the ears of the prophets of old but the distant tread
of foreign armies, coming to do the work of justice? He
no longer looked vaguely to the horizon for the coming
storm: he pointed to the rising cloud. The French army
was that new deluge which was to purify the earth from
iniquity; the French king, Charles VIIL, was the instru-
ment elected by God, as Cyrus had been of old, and all
men who desired good rather than evil were to rejoice in
his coming. For the scourge would fall destructively on
the impenitent alone. Let any city of Italy, let Florence
above all — Florence beloved of God, since to its ear the
warning voice had been specially sent — repent and turn
from its ways, like Nineveh of old, and the storm-cloud
would roll over it and leave only refreshing raindrops.

Fra Girolamo^s word was powerful; yet now that the
new Cyrus had already been three months in Italy, and
was not far from the gates of Florence, his presence was
expected there with mixed feelings, in which fear and dis-
trust certainly predominated. At present it was not
understood that he had redressed any grievances; and the
Florentines clearly had nothing to thank him for. He
held their strong frontier fortresses, which Piero de Med-
ici had given up to him without securing any honorable
terms in return; he had done nothing to quell the alarm-
ing revolt at Pisa, which had been encouraged by his
presence to throw off the Florentine yoke; and "orators,"
even with a prophet at their head, could win no assurance
from him, except that he would settle everything when he
was once within the walls of Florence. Still, there was
the satisfaction of knowing that the exasperating Piero de
Medici had been fairly pelted out for the ignominious sur-
render of the fortresses, and in that act of energy the
spirit of the Republic had recovered some of its old fire.

Tlie prejiarations for the equivocal guest were not
entirely those of a city resigned to submission. Behind
the bright drapery and banners symbolical of joy, there
were preparations of another sort made with common
accord by government and people. Well hidden within

THE PRISOXERS, 203

walls there were hired soldiers of the Eepublic, hastily
called iu from the surrounding districts; there were old
arms duly furbished, and sharp tools and heavy cudgels
laid carefully at hand, to be snatched up on short notice;
there were excellent boards and stakes to form barricades
upon occasion, and a good sup^jly of stones to make a sur-
prising hail from the upper windows. Above all, there were
people very strongly in the humor for fighting any person-
age who might be supj)osed to have designs of hectoring
over them, they having lately tasted that new pleasure
with much relish. This humor was not diminished by the
sight of occasional ]Darties of Frenchmen, coming before-
hand to choose their quarters, with a hawk, perhaps, on
their left wrist, and, metaphorically speaking, a piece of
chalk in their right hand to mark Italian doors withal;
especially as creditable historians imply that many sons of
France were at that time characterized by something
approaching to a swagger, which must have whetted the
Florentine appetite for a little stone-throwing.

And this was the temper of Florence on the morning of
the seventeenth of November, 1494.

CHAPTER XXII.

THE PEISOXERS.

The sky was gray, but that made little difference in the
Piazza del Duomo, which was covered with its holiday sky
of blue drapery, and its constellations of yellow lilies and
coats of arms. The sheaves of banners were unfurled at
the angles of the Baptistery, but there was no carpet yet
on the steps of the Duomo, for the marble was being trod-
den by numerous feet that were not at all exceptional. It
was the hour of the Advent sermons, and the very same
reasons which had flushed the streets with holiday color
were reasons why the preaching in the Duomo could least
of all be dispensed with.

But not all the feet in the Piazza were hastening toward
the steps. Peojole of high and low degree were moving to
and fro with the brisk pace of men who had errands before
them; groups of talkers were thickly scattered, some will-

204 BOMOLA.

ing to be late for the sermon, and others content not to
hear it at all.

The expression on the faces of these apparent loungers
was not that of men who are enjoying the pleasant laziness
of an opening holiday. Some were in close and eager dis-
cussion; others were listening with keen interest to a single
spokesman, and yet from time to time turned round witli
a scanning glance at any new passer-by. At the corner,
looking toward the Via de Cerretani — just where the arti-
ficial rainbow light of the Piazza ceased, and the gray
morning fell on the sombre stone houses — there was a
remarkable cluster of the working people, most of them
bearing on their dress or persons the signs of their daily
labor, and almost all of them carrying some weapon, or
some tool which might serve as a weapon upon occasion.
Standing in the gray light of the street, with bare brawny
arms and soiled garments, they made all the more striking
the transition from the brightness of the Piazza. Tliey
were listening to the thin notary, Ser Cioni, who had just
paused on his way to the Duomo. His biting words could
get only a contemptuous reception two years and a half
before in the Mercato, but now he spoke with the more
complacent humor of a man whose party is uppermost, and
who is conscious of some influence with the people.

''Never talk to me, " he was saying, in his incisive voice,
"never talk to me of bloodthirsty Swiss or fierce French
infantry: they might as well be in the narrow passes of the
mountains as in our streets; and peasants have destroyed
the finest armies of our condottieri in time past, when
they had once got them between steep precipices. I tell
you, Florentines need be afraid of no army in their own
streets."

" That's true, Ser Cioni," said a man whose arms and
hands were discolored by a crimson dye, which looked like
blood-stains, and who had a small hatchet stuck in his
belt; "and those French cavaliers, who came in squaring
themselves in their smart doublets the other da}^, saw a
sample of the dinner we could serve up for them. I Avas
carrying my cloth in Ognissanti, when I saw my fine
Messeri going by, looking round as if they thought the
houses of the Vespucci and the Agli a poor pick of lodg-
ings for them, and eyeing us Florentines, like top-knotted
cocks as they are, as if they pitied us because we didn't
know how to strut. 'Yes, my fine Galli,' says I, 'stick
out your stomachs; I've got a meat-axe in my belt that

THE riilSONERS. 205

will go inside you all the easier'; when presently the old
cow lowed,* and I knew something had happened — no
matter what. So I threw my cloth in at the first door-
way, and took hold of my meat-axe and ran after my fine
cavaliers toward the Vigna Nuova. And, 'What is it,
Guccio?' said I, when he came up with me. 'I think it's
the Medici coming back,' said Guccio. BemMl I expected
so! And up we reared a barricade, and the Frenchmen
looked behind and saw themselves in a trap; and up comes
a good swarm of our Giomiyi,\ and one of them with a big
scythe he had in his hand mowed off one of the fine
cavalier's feathers: — its true! And the lasses peppered a
few stones down to frighten them. However, Piero de
Medici wasn't come after all; and it was a pity; for we'd
have left him neither legs nor wings to go away with
again."

"Well spoken, Oddo," said a young butcher, with his
knife at his belt; and it's my belief Piero will be a good
while before he wants to come l^ack, for he looked as fright-
ened as a hunted chicken, when we hustled and pelted
him in the piazza. He's a coward, else he might have
made a better stand when he'd got his horsemen. But
we'll swallow no Medici any more, whatever else the French
king wants to make us swallow."

"But I like not those French cannon they talk of," said
Goro, none the less fat for two years' additional griev-
ances. "San Giovanni defend us! If Messer Domeneddio
means so well by us as your Frate says he does, Ser Cioni,
why shouldn't he have sent the French another way to
Naples?"

"Ay, Goro," said the dyer; "that's a question worth
putting. Thou art not such a pumpkin-head as I took
thee for. Why, they might have gone to Naples by
Bologna, eh, Ser Cioni? or if they'd gone to Arezzo — we
wouldn't have minded their going to Arezzo."

" Fools! It will be for the good and glory of Florence,"
Ser Cioni began. But he was interrupted by the exclam-
ation, "Look there! " which burst from several voices at
once, while the faces were all turned to a party who were
advancing along the Via de Cerretani.

"It's Lorenzo Tornabouni, and one of the French noble-
men who are in his house," said Ser Cioni, in some con-

* "iarfjwca munlia " was the phrase for the sounding of the great bell in
the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio.

+ The poorer artisans connected with the wool trade — wool-beaters,
carders, washers, etc.

2U6 ROMOLA.

tempt at this interruption. "He pretends to look well
satisfied — that deep Tornabiioni — but he's a Medicean in
his heart: mind that/'

The advancing party was rather a brilliant one, for there
was not only the distinguished presence of Lorenzo Torna-
buoni, and the splendid costume of the Frenchman with
his elaborately displayed white linen and gorgeous embroid-
ery; there were two other Florentines of high birth in
handsome dresses donned for the coming procession, and
on tlie left hand of the Frenchman was a figure that was
not to be eclipsed by any amount of intention or brocade —
a figure we have often seen before. He wore nothing but
black, for he was in mourning; but the black was presently
to be covered by a red mantle, for he too was to walk in
procession as Latin Secretary to the Ten. Tito Melema
had become conspicuously servicable in the intercourse
with the French guests, from his familiarity with South-
ern Italy, and his readiness in the French tongue, which
he had spoken in his early youth; and he had paid
more than one visit to the French camp at Signa. The
lustre of good fortune was upon him; he was smiling,
listening, and explaining, with his usual graceful unpreten-
tious ease, and only a very keen eye bent on studying him
could have marked a certain amount of change in him
which was not to be accounted for by the lapse of eighteen
months. It was that change which comes from the final
dejoarture of moral youthfulness — from the distinct self-
conscious adoption of a part in life. The lines of the face
were as soft as ever, the eyes as pellucid; but something
Avas gone — something as indefinable as the changes in the
morning twilight.

The Frenchman was gathering instructions concerning
ceremonial before riding back to Signa, and now he was
going to have a final survey of the Piazza del Duomo,
Avliere the royal procession w-as to pause for religious pur-
poses. The distinguished party attracted the notice of all
eyes as it entered tlie piazza, but the gaze was not entirely
cordial and admiring; there were remarks not altogether
allusive and mysterious to the Frenchman's hoof-shaped
shoes — delicate fiattery of royal superfiuity in toes; and
there was no care that certain snarlings at "Mediceans"
should be strictly inaudible. But Lorenzo Tornabuoni
possessed that power of dissembling annoyance which is
demanded in a man who courts popularity, and Tito,
besides his natural disposition to overcome ill-will by good-

THE PRISONERS. 207

humor, had the unimpassioned feeling of the alien toward
names and details that move the deepest passions of the

native. -, , , . • ^ n

Arrived where they could get a good oblique view ot the
Duomo, the party paused. The festoons and devices placed
over the central doorway excited some demur, and Torna-
buoni beckoned to Piero di Cosimo, who, as was usual with
him at this hour, was lounging in front of Nello's shop.
There was soon an animated discussion, and it became
highly amusing from the Frenchman's astonishment at
Piero's odd pungency of statement, which Tito translated
literally. Even snarling onlookers became curious, and
their faces began to wear the half-smiling, half-humiliated
expression of people who are not within hearing of the
ioke which is producing infectious laughter. It was a
delightful moment for Tito, for he was the only one o± the
party who could have made so amusing an interpreter, and
without any disposition to triumphant self-gratulation he
revelled in the sense that he was an object of likmg— he
basked in approving glances. The rainbow light fell
about the laughing group, and the grave church-goers had
all disappeared within the walls. It seemed as it the
piazza had been decorated for a real Florentine holiday.

Meanwhile in the gray light of the unadorned streets
there were on-comers who made no show of linen and
brocade, and whose humor was far from merry. Here,
too, the French dress and hoofed shoes were conspicuous,
but they were being pressed upon by a larger and larger
number of non-admiring Florentines. In the van of the
crowd were three men in scanty clothing; each had his
hands bound together by a cord, and a rope was fastened
round his neck and bodv, in such a way that he who held
the extiemitv of the rope might easily check any rebellious
movement by the threat of throttling. The men who
held the ropes were French soldiers, and by broken Italian
phrases and strokes from the knotted end of the rope,
they from time to time stimulated their prisoners to beg.
Two of them were obedient, and to every Florentine they
had encountered had held out their bound hands and said
in piteous tones — ^ , ,r -,

''For the love of God and the Holy Madonna, give us

something toward our ransom! We are Tuscans: we were

Inade prisoners in Lunigiana." ■-, , j n

But the third man remained obstinately silent under all

the strokes of the knotted cord. He was very different m

208 KOMOLA.

aspect from his two fellow-prisoners. They were young
and hardy, and, in the scant clothing which the avarice of
their captors had left them, looked like vulgar, sturdy
mendicants. But he had passed the boundary of old age,
and could hardly be less than four or five and sixty. His
beard, which had grown long in neglect, and the hair
which fell thick and straight round his baldness, were
nearly white. His thickset figure was still firm and
upright, though emaciated, and seemed to express energy
in spite of age — an expression that was partly carried out
in the dark eyes and strong dark eyebrows, which had a
strangely isolated intensity of color in the midst of his
yellow, bloodless, deep-Avrinkled face with its lank gray
hairs. And yet there was something fitful in the eyes
which contradicted the occasional flash of energy: after
looking round with quick fierceness at windows and faces,
they fell again Avith a lost and wandering look. But his
lips Avere motionless, and he held his hands resolutely
down. He would not beg.

This sight had been Avitnessed by the Florentines with
growing exasperation. Many standing at their doors or
passing quietly along had at once given money — some in
half-automatic response to an appeal in the name of God,
others in that unquestioning aAve of the French soldiery
Avhich had been created by the reports of their cruel Avar-
fare, and on which the French themselves counted as a
guarantee of immunity in their acts of insolence. But
as the group had proceeded farther into the heart of the
city, that compliance had gradually disappeared, and the
soldiers found themselves escorted by a gathering troop
of men and boys, Avho kept uji a chorus of exclamations,
sufficiently intelligible to foreign ears Avithout any inter-
preter. The soldiers themselves began to dfslike their
position, for, Avith a strong inclination to use their Aveap-
ons, they Avere checked by the necessity for keeping a
secure hold on their prisoners, and they Avere now hurrying
along in the hope of finding shelter in a hostelrv.

" French dogs! " " Bullock-feet! " " Snatch their pikes
from them!" "Cut the cords and make them run for
their prisoners. They'll run as fast as geese — don't you
see they're Aveb-footed?" These Avere the cries which the
soldiers vaguely understood to be Jeers, and probably
threats. But every one seemed disposed to give invita-
tions of this spirited kind rather than to act upon them.

" Santiddiol here's a sight!" said the dyer, as soon as he

THE PRISONERS. 209

had divined the meaning of the advancing tumult, " and
the fools do nothing but hoot. Come along!" he added,
snatching his axe from his belt, and running to Join the
crowd, followed by the butcher and all the rest of his
companions, except Goro, who hastily retreated up a narrow
passage.

The sight of the dyer, running forward with blood-red
arms and axe uplifted, and with his cluster of rough com-
panions behind him, had a stimulating effect on the crowd.
Not that he did anything else than pass beyond the soldiers
and thrust himself well among his fellow-citizens, flourish-
ing his axe; but he served as a stirring symbol of street
fighting, like the waving of a well-known gonfalon. And
the first sign that fire was ready to burst out was something
as rapid as a little leaping tongue of flame: it was an act of
the conjuror's impish lad, Lollo, who was dancing and
jeering in front of the ingenuous boys that made the
majority of the crowd. Lollo had no great compassion for
the prisoners, but being conscious of an excellent knife
which was his unfailing companion, it had seemed to him
from the first that to jump forward, cut a rope, and leap
back again before the soldier who held it could use his
weapon, would be an amusing and dexterous piece of mis-
chief. And now, when the people began to hoot and jostle
more vigorously, Lollo felt that his moment was come — he
Avas close to the eldest prisoner: in an instant he had cut
the cord.

" Run, old one!" he piped in the prisoner's ear as soon
as the cord was in two; and himself set the example of
running as if he were helped along with wings, like a
scared fowl.

The prisoner's sensations were not too slow for him to
seize the opportunity: the idea of escape had been contin-
ually present with him, and he had gathered fresh hope
from the temper of the crowd. He ran at once; but his
speed would hardly have sufficed for him if the Florentines
had not instantaneously rushed between him and his
captor. He ran on into the piazza, but he quickly heard
the tramp of feet behind him, for the other two prisoners
had been released, and the soldiers were struggling and
fighting their way after them, in such tardigrade fashion
as their hoof-shaped shoes would allow — impeded, but not
very resolutely attacked, by the people. One of the two
younger prisoners turned up the Borgd di San Lorenzo,
and thus made a iDartial diversion of the hubbub; but tho
14

210 ROMOLA.

main struggle was still toward the piazza, where all eyes
were turned on it with alarmed curiosity. The cause could
not be precisely guessed, for the French dress was screened
by the impeding crowd.

*'An escape of prisoners," said Lorenzo Tornabuoni, as
he and his party turned round just against the steps of the
Duomo, and saw a prisoner rushing by them. "The
people are not content with having emptied the Bargello
the other day. If there is no other authority in sight
they must fall on the sbirri and secure freedom to thieves.
All! there is a French soldier: that is more serious."

The soldier he saw was struggling along on the north
side of the piazza, but the object of his pursuit had taken
the other direction. That object was the eldest prisoner,
who had wheeled round the Baptistery and Avas running
toward the Duomo, determined to take refuge in that
sanctuary rather than trust to his speed. But in mount-
ing the steps, his foot received a shock; he was precipi-
tated toward the grou]) of signori, whose backs were
turned to him, and was only able to recover his balance as
he clutched one of them by the arm.

It was Tito Melema who felt that clutch. He turned
his head, and saw the face of his adopted father, Baldas-
sarre Calvo, close to his own.

The two men looked at each other, silent as death:
Baldassarre, with dark fierceness and a tightening griji of
the soiled worn hands on the velvet-clad arm; Tito, with
cheeks and lijis all bloodless, fascinated by terror. It
seemed a long while to them — it was but a moment.

The first sound Tito heard was the short laugh of Piero
di Cosimo, who stood close by him and was the only person
that could see his face.

"Ha, ha! I know what a ghost should be now."

"This is another escaped prisoner," said Lorenzo
Tornabuoni. "Who is he, I wonder?"

"Some madman, surely " said Tito.

He hardly knew how the words had come to his lips:
there are moments when our passions speak and decide for
us, and we seem to stand by and wonder. They carry in
them an inspiration of crime, that in one instant does the
work of long premeditation.

The two men had not taken their eyes off each other,
and it seemed to Tito, when he had spoken, that some
magical poison had darted from Baldassarre^s eyes, and

AFTER-THOUGHTS. 211

that he felt it rushing through his veins. But the next
instant the grasp on his arm had relaxed, and Baldassarre
had disappeared Avithin the church.

CHAPTER XXIII.

AFTER-THOUGHTS.

''You are easily frightened, though," said Piero, with
another scornful laugh. " My portrait is not as good as
the original. But the old fellow had a tiger look: I must
go into the Duomo and see him again."

''It is not pleasant to be laid hold of by a madman, if
madman he be," said Lorenzo Tornabuoni, in polite excuse
of Tito, " but perhaps he is only a ruffian. We shall hear.
I think we must see if we have authority enough to stop
this disturbance between our people and your country-
men," he added, addressing the Frenchman.

They advanced toward the crowd with their swords
drawn, all the quiet spectators making an escort for them.
Tito went too: it was necessary that he should know what
others knew about Baldassarre, and the first palsy of terror
was being succeeded by the rapid devices to which mortal
danger will stimulate the timid.

The rabble of men and boys, more inclined to hoot at
the soldier and torment him than to receive or inflict any
serious wounds, gave way at the approach of signori with
drawn swords, and the French soldier was interrogated.
He and his companions had simply brought their prisoners
into the city that they might beg money for their ransom:
two of the prisoners were Tuscan soldiers taken in Luni-
giana; the other, an elderly man, was with a party of
Genoese, with whom the French foragers had come to
blows near Fivizzano. He might be mad, but he was
harmless. The soldier knew no more, being unable to
understand a word the old man said. Tito heard so far,
but he was deaf to everything else till he was specially
addressed. It was Tornabuoni who spoke.

'' Will 3^ou go back with us, Melema? Or, since Messere
is going off to Signa now, will you wisely follow the fashion
of the times and go to hear the Frate, who will be like the
torrent at its height this niornino-? It's what we must all

212 ROMOLA.

do, you know, if we are to save our Medicean skins. I
should go if I had the leisure."

Tito's face had recovered its color now, and he could
make an effort to speak with gaiety.

" Of course I am among the admirers of the inspired
orator," he said, smilingly; but, unfortunately, I shall be
occupied with the Segretario till the time of the proces-
sion."

"I am going into the Duomo to look at that savage old
man again," said Piero.

"Then have the charity to show him to one of the
hospital's for travellers, Piero mio," said Tornabuoni.
"The monks may find out whether he wants putting into
a cage."

The party separated, and Tito took his way to the
Palazzo Vecchio, where he was to find Bartolommeo Scala.
It was not a long walk, but, for Tito, it was stretched out
like the minutes of our morning dreams: the short spaces
of street and piazza held memories, and previsions, and
torturing fears, that might have made the history of
months. He felt as if a ser])ent had begun to coil round
his limbs. Baldassarre living, and in Florence, was a
living revenge, which would no more rest than a winding
serpent would rest until it had crushed its prey. It was
not in the nature of that man to let an injury pass un-
avenged: his love and his hatred were of that passionate
fervor which subjugates all the rest of the being, and
makes a man sacrifice himself to his passion as if it were a
deity to be worshipped with self-destruction. Baldassarre
had relaxed his hold, and had disappeared. Tito knew
well how to interpret that: it meant that the vengeance
was to be studied that it might be sure. If he had not
uttered those decisive words — " He is a madman" — if he
could have summoned up the state of mind, the courage,
necessary for avowing his recognition of Baldassarre, would
not the risk have been less? He might have declared him-
self to have had what he believed to be positive evidence
of Baldassare's death; and the only persons who could ever
have had positive knowledge to contradict him were Fra
Luca, who was dead, and the crew of the companion
galley, who had brought him the news of the encounter
with the pirates. The chances were infinite against Bald-
assarre's having met again with any one of that crew, and
Tito thought with bitterness that a timely, well-devised
falsehood might have saved him from any fatal conse-

AFTER-THOUGHTS. 213

queuces. But to have told that falsehood would have
required perfect self-eoinmaud in the niomeut of a con-
vulsive shock: he seemed to have spoken without any pre-
conception: the words had leaped forth like a sudden birth
that had been begotten and nourished in the darkness.

Tito was experiencing that inexorable law of human
souls, that we prepare ourselves for sudden deeds by the
reiterated choice of good or evil which gradually determines
character.

There was but one chance for him now; the chance of
Baldassarre's failure in finding his revenge. And — Tito
grasped at a thought more actively cruel than any he had
ever encouraged before: might not his OAvn unpremeditated
words have some truth in them? Enough truth, at least,
to bear him out in his denial of any declaration Baldassare
might make about him? The old man looked strange and
wild; with his eager heart and brain, suffering was likely
enough to have produced madness. If it were so, the
vengeance that strove to inflict disgrace might be baffled.

But there was another form of vengeance not to be
baffled by ingenious lying. Baldassarre belonged to a race
to whom the thrust of the dagger seems almost as natural
an impulse as the outleap of the tiger's talons. Tito
shrank with shuddering dread from disgrace; but he had
also that physical dread which is inseparable from a soft,
pleasure-loving nature, and which prevents a man from
meeting wounds and death as a welcome relief from dis-
grace. His thoughts flew at once to some hidden defensive
armor that might save him from a vengeance which no
subtlet}^ could parry.

He wondered at the power of the passionate fear that
possessed him. It was as if he had been smitten with a
Tjlightiug disease that had suddenly turned the joyous sense
of young life into pain.

There was still one resource open to Tito. He might
have turned back, sought Baldassarre again, confessed
everything to him — to Eomola — to all the world. But he
never thought of that. The repentance which cuts off all
moorings to evil, demands something more than selfish
fear. He had no sense that there was strength and safety
in truth; the only strength he trusted to lay in his inge-
nuity and his dissimilation. Xow that the first shock,
which had called up the traitorous signs of fear, was well
past, he hoped to be prepared for all emergencies by cool
deceit — and defensive armor.

214 ROMOLA,

It was a characteristic fact in Tito's experience at this
crisis, that no direct measure for ridding himself of Bal-
dassarre ever occurred to him. All other possibilities
passed through his mind, even to his own flight from
Florence; but he never thought of any scheme for remov-
ing his enemy. His dread generated no active malignity,
and he would still have been glad not to give pain to any
mortal. He had simply chosen to make life easy to him-
self— to carry his human lot, if possible, in such a way that
it should pinch him nowhere; and the choice had, at various
times, landed him in unexpected positions. The question
now was, not whether he should divide the common pres-
sure of destiny with his suffering fellow-men; it was whether
all the resources of lying would save liim from being crushed
by the consequences of that habitual choice.

CHAPTER XXIV.

INSIDE THE DUOMO.

Whex Baldassarre, with his hands bound together, and
the rope round his neck and body, pushed his way behind
the curtain, and saw the interior of the Duomo before
him, he gave a start of astonishment, and stood still
against the doorway. He had expected to see a vast nave
empty of everything but lifeless emblems — side altars
with candles unlit, dim pictures, pale and rigid statues —
Avith perhaps a few worshippers in the distant choir follow-
ing a monotonous chant. That was the ordinary aspect of
churches to a man who never went into them with any
religious purpose.

And he saw, instead, a vast multitude of warm, living
faces, upturned in breathless silence toward the pulpit,
at the angle between tlie nave and the choir. The multr-
tude was of all ranks, from magistrates and dames of
gentle nurture to coarsely-clad artisans and country people.
In the pulpit was a Dominican friar, with strong features
and dark hair, preaching with the crucifix in his hand.

For the first few minutes Baldassarre noted nothing of
his preaching. Silent as his entrance had been, some eyes
near the doorway had been turned on him with surprise
and suspicion. The rope indicated plainly enough that he

INSIDE THE DUOMO. '/ilS

was an escaped prisoner, but in that case the church was a
sanctuary which he had a right to claim; his advanced
years and look of wild misery were fitted to excite pity
rather than alarm; and as he stood motionless, with eyes
that soon wandered absently from the wide scene before
him to the j^avement at his feet, those who had observed
his entrance presently ceased to regard him, and became
absorbed again in the stronger interest of listening to the
sermon.

Among the eyes that had been turned toward him were
Romola's: she had entered late through one of the side
doors and was so placed that she had a full view of the
main entrance. She had looked long and attentively at
Baldassarre, for grey hairs made a peculiar appeal to her,
and the stamp of some unwonted suffering in the face,
confirmed by the cord round his neck, stirred in her those
sensibilities toward the sorrows of age, which her whole
life had tended to develop. She fancied that his e3'es had
met hers in their first wandering gaze; but Baldassarre
had not, in reality, noted her; he had only had a startled
consciousness of the general scene, and the conscioucness
was a mere flash that made no perceptible break in the
fierce tumult of emotion which the encounter with Tito
had created. Images from the past kept urging them-
selves upon him like delirious visions strangly blended with
thirst and anguish. Xo distinct thought for the future
could shape itself in the midst of that fiery passion: the
nearest approach to such thought was the bitter sense of
enfeebled powers, and a vague determination to universal
distrust and suspicion. Suddenly he felt himself vibrating
to loud tones, which seemed like the thundering echo of
his own passion. A voice that penetrated his very marrow
with its accent of triumphant certitude was sa3dng — ''The
day of vengeance is at hand!"

Baldassarre quivered and looked up. He was too distant
to see more than the general aspect of the preacher stand-
ing, with his right arm outstretched, lifting up the cruci-
fix; but he panted for the threatening voice again as if it
had been a jn'omise of bliss. There was a pause before
the preacher spoke again. He gradually lowered his arm.
He deposited the crucifix on the edge of the pulpit, and
crossed his arms over his breast, looking round at the mul-
titude as if he would meet the glance of every individual
face.

" All ye in Florence are my witnesses, for I spoke not in

216 ROMOLA.

a corner. Ye are my witnesses, that four years ago, wlien \
there were yet no signs of war and tribulation, I preached
the coming of the scourge. I lifted up my voice as a trum-
pet to the prelates and princes and people of Italy and
said, the cup of your iniquity is full. Behold, the thun-
der of the Lord is gathering, and it shall fall and break
the cup, and your iniquity, which seems to you as pleas-
ant wine, shall be poured out upon you, and shall be as
molten lead. And you, 0 priests, who say. Ha, ha! there
is no Presence in the sanctuary — the Shechinah is noiight —
the Mercy-seat is bare: we may sin behind the veil, and
Avho shall punish us? To you, I said, the presence of God
shall be revealed in his temple as a consuming fire, and
your sacred garments shall become a winding-sheet of
flame, and for sweet music there shall be shrieks and his-
sing, and for soft couches there shall be thorns, and for
the breath of wantons shall come the pestilence. Trust
not in your gold or silver, trust not in your high fortresses;
for, thougli the walls were of iron, and the fortresses of
adamant, the Most High shall put terror into your hearts
and weakness into your councils, so that you shall be con-
founded and flee like women. He shall break in pieces
mighty men without number, and put others in their stead.
For God will no longer endure the pollution of his sanc-
tuary; he will thoroughly purge his Church.

"And forasmuch as it is written tliat God will do noth-
ing but he revealeth it to his servants the prophets, he has
chosen me, his unworthy servant, and made his purpose
present to my soul in the living word of the Scriptures,
and in the deeds of his providence; and by the ministry of
angels he has revealed it to me in visions. And his word
possesses me so that I am- but as the branch of the forest
when the wdnd of heaven penetrates it, and it is not in me
to keep silence, even though I may be a derision to the
scorner. And for four years I have preached in obedience
to tlie Divine will: in the face of scofling I have preached
three things, which the Lord has delivered to me: that in
tl/cse times' God will regenerate his Church, and that before
the regeneration must come the scovrge over all Italy, and
that these things will come qnirklg.

'*But hypocrites wlio cloak their hatred of the truth
with a show of love have said to me, ' Come now, Frate,
leave your prophesyings: it is enough to teach virtue.'
To tliese I answer: ''Yes, you say in your hearts, God lives
afar off, and his word is as a parchment written by dead

INSIDE THE DUOMO. 217

men, and he deals not as in the days of old, rebuking the
nations, and punishing the oppressors, and smiting the
unholy priests as he smote the sons of Eli. But I cry
again in your ears: God is near and not afar off; his judg-
ments change not. He is the God of armies; the strong
men who go up to battle are his ministers, even as the
storm, and fire, and pestilence. He drives them by the
breath of his angels, and they come upon the chosen land
which has forsaken the covenant. And thou, 0 Italy, art
the chosen land; has not God placed his sanctuary within
thee, and thou hast polluted it? Behold, the ministers of
his wrath are upon thee — they are at thy very doors!'"

Savonarola's voice had been rising in impassioned force
up to this point, when he became suddenly silent, let his
hands fall and clasped them quietly before him. His
silence, instead of being the signal for small movements
amongst his audience, seemed to be as strong a spell to
them as his voice. Through the vast area of the cathedral
men and women sat with faces upturned, like breathing
statues, till the voice was heard again in clear low tones.

''Yet there is a pause — even as in the days when Jeru-
salem was destroyed there was a pause that the children of
God might flee from it. There is a stillness before the
storm: lo, there is blackness above, but not a leaf quakes:
the winds are stayed, that the voice of God's warning
might be heard. Hear it now, 0 Florence, chosen city in
the chosen land! Repent and forsake evil: do justice:
love mercy: put away all uncleanness from among you,
that the spirit of truth and holiness may fill your souls
and breathe through all your streets and habitations, and
then the pestilence shall not enter, and the sword shall
pass over you and leave you unhurt.

" For the sword is hanging from the sky; it is quivering;
it is about to fall! The sword of God upon the earth,
swift and sudden! Did I not tell you, years ago, that I
had beheld the vision and heard the voice? And behold,
it is fulfilled! Is there not a king with his army at your
gates? Does not the earth shake with the tread of horses
and the wheels of swift cannon? Is there not a fierce
multitude that can lay bare the land with a sharp razor?
I tell you the French king with his army is the minister of
God: God shall guide him as the hand guides a sharp
sickle, and the joints of the wicked shall melt before him,
and they shall be mown down as stubble: he that fleeth of
them shall not flee aw.iy, and he that escapeth of them

xJlS KOMOLA.

shall not be delivered. And the tyrants who have made
to themselves a throne out of the vices of the multitude,
and the unbelieving priests who traffic in the souls of men
and fill the very sanctuary with fornication, shall be hurled
from their soft couches into burning hell; and the pagans
and they who sinned under the old covenant shall stand
aloof and say: *Lo, these men have brought the stench
of a new wickedness into the everlasting fire/

"But thou, 0 Florence, take the offered mercy. See!
the Cross is held out to you: come and be healed. Which
among the nations of Italy has had a token like unto
yours? The tyrant is driven out from among you: the
men who held a bribe in their left hand and a rod in the
right are gone forth, and no blood has been spilled. And
now put away every other abomination from among you,
and you shall be strong in the strength of the living God.
Wash yourselves from the black pitch of your vices, which
have made you even as the heathens: put away the envy
and hatred that have made your city as a nest of wolves.
And there shall no harm happen to you: and the i)assage
of armies shall be to you as a flight of birds, and rebellious
Pisa shall be given to you again, and famine and pestilence
shall be far from your gates, and you shall be as a beacon
among the nations. But, mark! while you suffer the
accursed thing to lie in the camp you shall be afflicted and
tormented, even though a remnant among you may be
saved."

These admonitions and promises had been spoken in an
incisive tone of authority; but in the next sentence the
preacher's voice melted into a strain of entreaty.

" Listen, 0 people, over whom my heart yearns, as the
heart of a mother over the children she has travailed for!
God is my witness tliat but for your sakes I would willingly
live as a turtle in the depths of the forest, singing low to
my Beloved, who is mine and I am his. For you I toil,
for you I languish, for you my nights are spent in watch-
ing, and my soul melteth away for very heaviness. 0 Lord,
thou knowest I am willing — T am ready. Take me, stretch
me on thy cross: let the wicked who delight in blood, and
rob the poor, and defile the temj^jle of their bodies, and
harden themselves against thy mercy — let them wag their
heads and shoot out the lip at me: let the thorns press
upon my brow, and let my sweat be anguish — I desire to
be made like Thee in thy great love. But let me see the
fruit of my travail — let this people be saved! Let me see

. ixpihe tiik nT-o:\ro. 210

them clothf'fl in purity: lot me lioar thoir voices rise in
concord as the voices of angels: let them see no wisdom
but in thy eternal law, no beauty but in holines?. Then
they shall lead the way before the nation.s, and the people
from the four winds shall follow them, and be gathered
into the fold of the blessed. For it is thy will, 0 God,
that the earth shall be converted unto thy law: it is thy
will that wickedness shall cease and love shall reign. Come,
0 blessed promise; and behold, I am willing — lay me on
the altar: let my blood flow and the fire consume me; but
let my witness be remembered among men, that iniquity
shall not prosper forever. ''*

During the last appeal, Savonarola had stretched out his
arms and lifted up his eyes to heaven; his strong voice had
alternately trembled with emotion and risen again in
renewed energy; but the passion with which he offered
himself as a victim became at last too strong to allow of
further speech, and he ended in a sob. Every changing
tone, vibrating through the audience, shook them into
answering emotion. There were plenty among them who
had very moderate faith in the Frate's prophetic mission,
and who in their cooler moments loved him little; never-
theless, they too were carried along by the great wave of
feeling which gathered its force from sympathies that lay
deeper than all theory. A loud responding sob rose at once
from the wide multitude, while Savonarola had fallen on
his knees and buried his face in his mantle. He felt in that
moment the rapture and glory of martyrdom without its
agony.

In that great sob of the multitude Baldassarre's had
mingled. Among all the human beings i)resent, there was
perhaps not one whose frame vibrated more strongly than
his to the tones and words of the preacher; but it had
vibrated like a harp of which all the strings had been
wrenclied away except one. That threat of a fiery inexor-
able vengeance — of a future into which the hated sinner
might be pursued and held by the avenger in an eternal
grapple, had come to him like the promise of an unquench-
able fountain to unquenchable thirst. The doctrines of
the sages, the old contempt for priestly superstitions, had
fallen awav from his soul like a forgotten language: if he
could have remembered them, what answer could they
have given to his great need like the answer given by this

* Ilic £31111011 here rrlrcn i; net i trans liition, tut a free representation of
Tra Girolamo's preacmng in its more impassicned moments.

2Z(> ROMOLA,

voice of energetic conviction? The thunder of dennncia-
tion fell on his passion-vvronght nerves with all the force
of self-evidence. His thought never went beyond it into
questions — he was possessed bj' it as the war-horse is pos-
sessed by the clash of sounds. No word that was not a
threat touched his consciousness; he had no fibre to be
thrilled by it. But the fierce exultant delight to which he
was moved by the idea of perpetual vengeance found at
once a climax and a relieving outburst in the preacher's
words of self-sacrifice. To Baldassarre those words only
brought the vague triumphjint sense that he, too, was
devoting himself — signing with his own blood the deed by
which he gave himself over to an unending fire, that
would seem but coolness to his burning hatred.

''I rescued him — I cherished him — if I might clutch
his heart-strings forever! Come, 0 blessed promise! Let
my blood flow; let the fire consume me!"

The one cliord vibrated to its utmost. Baldassarre
clutched his own palms, driving his long nails into them,
and burst into a sob with the rest.

CHAPTER XXV.

OUTSIDE THE DUOMO.

"While Baldassarre was possessed by the voice of Savon-
arola, he had not noticed that another man had entered
through the doorway behind him, and stood not far off
observing him. It was Piero di Cosimo, who took no heed
of the preaching, having come solely to look at the escaped
prisoner. During the pause, in which the preacher and
his audience had given themselves up to inarticulate emo-
tion, the new-comer advanced and touched Baldassarre on
the arm. He looked round with the tears still slowly
rolling down his face, but with a vigorous sigh, as if he
had done with that outburst. The painter spoke to him
in a low tone —

" Shall I cut your cords for 3'ou? I have heard how you
were made prisoner."

Baldassarre rlid not reply immediately: he glanced sus-
piciously at the officious strangi r. At last he said, "If
you will."

01 T>1DE THE [jT'OMO. 221

" Better come outside/^ said Piero.

Baldassarre again looked at him suspiciously; and Piero
partly guessing his thought, smiled, took out a knife and
cut the cords. He began to think that the idea of the
prisoner's madness was not improbable, there was some-
thing so peculiar in the expression of his face. " Well/''
he thought, "if he does any mischief, hell soon get tied
up again. The poor devil shall have a cliauce, at least.*'

" You are afraid of me," lie said again, in an undertone;
"you don't want to tell me anything about yourself."

Baldassarre was folding his arms in enjoyment of the
long-absent muscular sensation. He answered Piero with
a less suspicious look and tone which had some quiet deci-
sion in it.

"No, I have nothing to tell."

"As you please," said Piero, "but perhaps you want
shelter, and may not know how hospitable we Florentines
are to visitors with torn doublets and empty stomachs.
There's an hospital for poor travelers outside all our gates,
and, if you liked, I could put you in the Avay to one.
There's no danger from vour French soldier. He has been
sent off."

Baldassarre nodded, and turned in silent acceptance of
the offer, and he and Piero left the church together,

" You Avouldn't like to sit to me for your portrait, should
you?" said Piero, as they went along the Via dell Oriuolo,
on the way to the gate of Santa Croce. " I am a painter:
I would give you money to get your portrait."

The suspicion returned into Baldassarre's glance, as he
looked at Piero, and said decidedly, "No."

" Ah I " said the painter, curtly. " Well, go straight on,
and you'll find the Porta Santa Croce, and outside it
there's an hospital for travelers. So you'll not accept any
service from me?"

"I give yoa thanks for what you have done already. I
need no more."

"It is well," said Piero, with a shrug, and they turned
away from each other.

"A mysterious old tiger!" thought the artist, "well
worth painting. Ugly — with deep lines— looking as if the
plough and harrow had gone over his heart. A fine con-
trast to my bland and smiling Messer Greco — my Bacco
trinufanfp. who has married the fair Antigone in contra-
diction to all history and fitness. \\vd\ his scholar's blood
curdled uncomfortably at the old fellow's clutch!"

223 ROMOLA.

When Pievo re-entered the Piazza del Duomo the multi-
tude who had been listening to Fra Girolamo were pouring
out from all the doors, and the haste they made to go on
their several ways was a proof how important they held the
preaching which had detained them from the other occu-
pations of the day. The artist leaned against an angle of
the Baptistery and watched the departing crowd, delight-
ing in the variety of the garb and of the keen characteristic
faces — faces such as Masaccio had painted more than fifty
years before: such as Domenico Ghiriandajo had not yet
quite left off painting.

This morning was a peculiar occasion, and the Frate's
audience, always multifarious, had represented even more
completely than usual the various classes and political
parties of Florence. There were men of high birth, accus-
tomed to public charges at home and abroad, who had
become newly conspicuous not only as enemies of the
Medici and friends of popular government, but as thor-
ough Piagnoni, espousing to the .utmost the doctrines
and practical teaching of the Frate, and frequenting
San Marco as the seat of another Samuel: some of
them men of authoritative and handsome presence, like
Francesco Valori, and perhaps also of a hot and arrogant
temper, very much gratified by an immediate divine
authority for bringing about freedom in their own Avay;
others, like Soderini, with less of the ardent Piagnone,
and more of the Avise politician. There were men, also of
family, like Piero Capponi, simply brave undoctrinal
lovers of a sober republican liberty, who preferred fighting
to arguing, and had no particular reasons for thinking
any ideas false that kejot out the Medici and made room
for public spirit. At their elbows were doctors of law
whose studies of Accursius and his brethren had not so
entirely consumed their ardor as to prevent them from
becoming enthusiastic Piagnoni: Messer Luca Corsini
himself, for example, who on a memorable occasion yet
to come was to raise his learned arms in street stone-
throwing for the cause of religion, freedom, and the
Frate. And among the dignities who carried their black
lucco or furred mantle with an air of habitual authority,
there was an abundant sprinkling of men with more
contemplative and sensitive faces: scholars inheriting
such high names as Strozzi and Acciajoli, who were
already minded to take the cowl and join the com-
munity of San Marco; artists wrought to a new and

OUTSIDl THE DCO-MO. 22S

higher ambition by tlie teaching of Savonarola, like that
yonng painter who had lately surpassed himself in his
fresco of the divine child on the wall of the Frate^s bare
cell — unconscious yet that he would one day himself wear
the tonsure and the cowl, and be called Fra Bartolommeo.
There was the mystic poet Girolamo Benevieni hastening,
perhaps, to carry tidings of the beloved Frate's speedy
coming to his friend Pico della Mirandola, who was never
to see the light of another morning. There were well-
born women attired with such scrupulous plainness that
their more i-efined grace was the chief distinction between
them and their less aristocratic sisters. There was a pre-
dominant proportion of the genuine popolani or middle
class, belonging both to the Major and Minor Arts, con-
scious of purses threatened by war-taxes. And more strik-
ing and various, perhaps, than all the other classes of the
Frate's disciples, there was the long stream of poorer
tradesmen and artisans, whose faith and hope in his
Divine message varied from the rude and undiscriminating
trust in him as the friend of the poor and the enemy of
the luxurious oppressive rich, to that eager tasting of ail
the subleties of biblical interpretation which takes pecul-
iarly strong hold on the sedentary artisan, illuminating the
long dim spaces beyond the board where he stitches, with
a pale flame that seems to him the light of Divine science.
But among these various disciples of the Frate were
scattered many who were not in the least his disciples.
Some were Mediceans who had already, from motives of
fear and policy, begun to show the presiding spirit of the
popular party a feigned deference. Others were sincere
advocates of a free government, but regarded Savonarola
simply as an ambitious monk — half sagacious, half fanat-
ical— who had made himself a powerful instrument with
the people, and must be accepted as an important social
fact. There were even some of his bitter enemies: mem-
bers of the old aristocratic anti-Medicean party — determ-
ined to try and get the reins once more tight in the hands
of certain chief families; or else licentious young men,
who detested him as the kill-joy of Florence. For the
sermons in the Duomo had already become political inci-
dents, attracting the ears of curiosity and malice, as well
as of faith. The men of ideas, like young Niccolo Mac-
chiavelli, went to observe and write reports to friends away
in country villas: the men of appetites, like Dolfo Spini,
bent on hunting down the Frate, as a public nuisance who

224: ROMOLA.

made game scarce, went to feed tlieir hatred and lie in
wait for grounds of accusation.

Perhaps, while no preacher ever had a more massive
influence than Savonarola, no preaclier ever had more
heterogeneous materials to work upon. And one secret
of the massive influence lay in the highly mixed character
of his preaching. Baldassarre, wrought into an ecstasy of
self-martyring revenge, was only an extreme case among
the partial and narrow sympathies of that audience. In
Savonarola^s preaching there were strains that appealed
to the very finest susceptibilities of men's natures, and
there were elements that gratified low egoism, tickled
gossiping curiosity, and fascinated timorous supersti-
tion. His need of personal iiredominance, his labyrin-
thine allegorical interpretations of the Scriptures,"^ his
enigmatic visions, and his false certitude about the Divine
intentions, never ceased, in his own large soul, to be
ennobled by that fervid piety, that passionate sense of the
infinite, that active sympathy, that clear-sighted demand
for the subjection of selfish interests to the general good,
which he had in common with the greatest of mankind.
But for the mass of his audience all the pregnancy of his
])reachinglay in his strong assertion of supernatural claims,
in his denunciatory visions, in the false certitude which
gave his sermons the interest of a political bulletin; and
having once held that audience in his mastery, it was
necessary to his nature — it was necessary for their welfare —
that he should keep the mastery. The effect was inevitable.
No man ever struggled to retain jDower over a mixed mul-
titude without suffering vitiation; his standard must be
their lower needs and not his own best insight.

The mysteries of human character have seldom been
presented in a way more fitted to check the judgments of
facile knowingness than in Girolamo Savonarola; but we
can give him a reverence that needs no shutting of the
eyes to fact, if we regard his life as a drama in which there
were great inward modifications accompanying the out-
ward changes. And up to this period, when his more
direct action on political affairs had only just l)cgun. it is
probable tliat his imperious need of ascendancy had burned
undiscernibly in the strong flame of his zealfor God and
man.

It was a fashion of old, when an ox was led out for
sacrifice to Jupiter, to chalk the dark spots, and give the
offering a false show of unblemished whiteness. Let us

THE GARMEXT OF FEAR. 225

fling away the chalk, and boldly say — the victim is spotted,
but it is not therefore in vain that his mighty heart is laid
on the altar of men's highest hopes.

CHAPTEK XXVI.

THE GARMEXT OF FEAR.

At six o'clock that evening most people in Florence
were glad the entrance of the new Charlemagne was fairly
over. Doubtless when the roll of drums, the blast of
trumpets, and the tramp of horses along the Pisan road
began to mingle vrith the pealing of the excited bells, it
was a grand moment for those who were stationed on tur-
ruted roofs, and could see the long-winding terrible pomp
on the background of the green hills and valley. There
was no sunshine to light up the splendor of banners, and
spears, and plumes, and silken surcoats, but there was no
thick cloud of dust to hide it, and as the picked troops
advanced into close view, they could be seen all the more
distinctly for the absence of dancing glitter. Tall and
tough Scotch archers, Swiss halberdiers fierce and ponder-
ous, nimble Gascons ready to wheel and climb, cavalry in
which each man looked like a knight-errant with his
indomitable spear and charger — it was satisfactory to be
assured that they would injure nobody but the enemies of
God! With that confidence at heart it was a less dubious
pleasure to look at the array of strength and splendor in
nobles and knights, and youthful pages of choice line-
age— at the bossed and jeweled sword-hilts, at the satin
scarfs embroidered with strange symbolical devices of
pious or gallant meaning, at the gold chajns and jeweled
aigrettes, at the gorgeous horse-trappings and brocaded
mantles, and at the transcendent canopy carried by select
youths above the head of the Most Christian King. To
sum up with an old diarist, whose spelling and diction
halted a little behind the vronders of this royal visit, —
^'fh gran magnijicenza."

But for the Signoria, who had been waiting on their

platform against the gates, and had to march out at the

right moment, with their orator in front of them, to meet

the mighty guest, the grandeur of the scene had been

326 ROMOLA.

somewhat screened by unpleasant sensations. If Messer
Luca Corsini could have had a brief Latin welcome de-
pending from his mouth in legible characters, it would
have been less confusing when the rain came on, and
created an impatience in men and horses that broke off
the delivery of his well-studied periods, and reduced the
representatives of the scholarly city to offer a makeshift
welcome in impromptu French. But that sudden confu-
sion had created a great opportunity for Tito. As one of
the secretaries he was among the officials who were sta-
tioned behind the Signoria, and with whom these highest
dignities were promiscuously thrown when pressed upon
by the horses.

"Somebody step forward and say a few words in
French," said Soderini. But no one of high importance
chose to risk a second failure. "* You, Francesco Gaddi —
you can speak." But Gaddi, distrusting his own prompt-
ness, hung back, and pushing Tito, said, "^ You, Melenia."

Tito stepped forward in an instant, and, with the air of
profound deference that came as naturally to him as walk-
ing, said the few needful words in tlie name of the Sig-
noria; then gave way gracefully, and let the king pass on.
His presence of mind, which had failed him in the terrible
crisis of the morning, had been a ready instrument this
time. It was an excellent livery servant that never forsook
him when danger was not visible. But when he was com-
plimented on his opportune service, he laughed it off as a
thing of no moment, and to those who had not witnessed
it, let Gaddi have the credit of the improvised welcome.
No wonder Tito was popular: the touchstone by which
men try us is most often their own vanity.

Other things besides the oratorical welcome had turned
out rather worse than had been expected. If everything
had happened according to ingenious preconceptions, the
Florentine procession of clergy and laity Avould not have
found their way choked up and been obliged to take a
make-shift course through the back streets, so as to meet
the king at the Cathedral only. Also, if the young mon-
arch under the canopy, seated on his charger with his
lance upon his thigh, had looked more like a Charlemagne
and less like a hastily modeled grotesque, the imagination
of his admirers would have been much assisted. It might
have been wished that the scourge of Italian wickedness
and "Champion of tlie honor of women" had had a less
miserable leg, and only the normal sum of toes; that his

THE GARMENT OF FEAR. 227

mouth had been of a less reptilian width of slit, his nose
and head of a less exorbitant outline. But the thin leg
rested on cloth of gold and pearls, and the face was only
an interruption of a few square inches in the midst of
black velvet and gold, and the blaze of rubies, and the
brilliant tints of the embroidered and bepearled canopy, —
'\fu gran magnificenza."

And the people had cr'iedi Francia, Framia! with an
enthusiasm proportioned to the splendor of the canopy
which they had torn to pieces as their spoil, according to
immemorfal custom; royal lips had duly kissed the altar;
and after all mischances the royal person and retinue were
lodged in the Palace of the Via Larga, the rest of the
nobles and gentry were dispersed among the great houses
of Florence, and the terrible soldiery were encamped in the
Prato and other open quarters. The business of the day
was ended.

But the streets still presented a surprising aspect, such
as Florentines had not seen before under the November
stars. Instead of a gloom unbroken except by a lamp
burning feebly here and there before a saintly image at the
street corners, or by a stream of redder light from an open
doorway, there were lamps suspended at the windows of all
houses, so that men could walk along no less securely and
commodioixsly than by day, — "fu gran magnificenza."

Along these illuminated streets Tito Melema was walk-
ing at about eight o'clock in the evening, on his way
homeward. He had been exerting himself throughout the
day under the pressure of hidden anxieties, and had at
last made his escape unnoticed from the midst of after-
supper gaiety. Once at leisure thoroughly to face and
consider his circumstances, he hoped that he could so
adjust himself to them and to all probabilities as to get rid
of his childish fear. If he had only not been wanting in
the presence of mind necessary to recognize Baldassarre
under that surprise I — it would have been happier for him
on all accounts; for he still winced under the sense that
he was deliberately inflicting suffering on his father: he
would very much have preferred that Baldassarre should
be prosperous and happy. But he had left himself no
second path now: there could be no conflict any longer:
the only thing he had to do Avas to take care of himself.

While these thoughts were in his mind he was advancing
from the Piazza di Santa Croce along the ^"ia dei Benei,
and as he neared the angle turning into the Borgo Santa

338 KOMOLA.

Croce his ear was struck by a music which was not that of
evening revelry, but of vigorous labor — the music of the
anvil. Tito gave a slight start and quickened his pace,
for the sounds had suggested a welcome thought. He
knew that they came from the workshop of Niccolo
Caparra, famous resort of all Florentines who cared for
curious and beautiful iron-work.

'•' What makes the giant at work so late?" thought Tito.
^' But so much the better for me. I can do that little bit
of business to-night instead of to-morrow morning."

Preoccupied as he was, he could not help pausing a
moment m admiration as he came in front of the work-
shop. The wide doorway, standing at the truncated angle
of a great block or " isle " of houses, was surmounted by a
loggia roofed with fluted tiles, and supported by stone
columns with roughly carved capitals. Against the red light
framed in by the outline of the fluted tiles and columns
stood in black relief the grand figure of Niccolo. with his
huge arms in rhythmic rise and fall, first hiding and then
disclosing the profile of his firm mouth and powerful brow.
Two slighter ebony figures, one at the anvil, the other at
the bellows, served to set off his supersor massiveness.

Tito darkened the doorway with a very different outline,
standing in silence, since it was useless to speak until
Niccolo should deign to pause and notice him. That was
not until the smith had beaten the head of an ax to the
due sharpness of edge and dismissed it from his anvil. But
in the meantime Tito had satisfied himself by a glance
round the shop that the object of which he was in search
had not disappeared.

Niccolo gave an unceremonious but good-humored nod
as he turned from the anvil and rested his hammer on
his hip.

" What is it, Messer Tito? Business?"

"Assuredly, Niccolo; else I should not have ventured
to interrupt you wh^n you are working out of hours, since
I take that as a sign that your work is pressing."

"I've been at the same work all day — making axes and
spear-heads. And every fool that has passed my shop has
put his pumpkin-head in to say, ' Niccolo, wilt thou not
come and see the King of France and his soldiers?' and
I've answered, 'No; I don't want to see their faces — I
want to see their backs.'"

"Are you making arms for the citizens, then, Niccolo,

THE GAKMENT OF FEAK. 329

that they may have something better than rusty scythes
and spits in case of an uproar?"

" We shall see. Arms are good, and Florence is likely
to want them. The Frate tells us we shall get Pisa again,
and I hold with the Frate; but I should be glad to know
how the promise is to be fulfilled, if we don't get plenty of
good weapons forged? The Frate sees a long way before
him; that I believe. But he doesn't see birds caught with
winking at them, as some of our people try to make out.
He sees sense, and not nonsense. But you're a bit of a
Medicean, Messer Tito Melema, Ebbene! so I've been
myself in my time, before the cask began to run sour.
What's your business?"

"Simply to know the price of that fine coat of mail I
saw hanging up here the other day. I want to buy it for
a certain personage who needs a protection @f that sort
under his doublet."

" Let him come and buy it himself, then," said Niccolo,
bluntly. " I'm rather nice about what I sell, and whom I
sell to. I like to know who's my customer."

"I know your scruples, Niccolo. But that is only
defensive armor; it can hurt nobody."

-'True; but it may make the man who wears it feel
himself all the safer if he should want to hurt somebody.
No, no: it's not my own work; but it's fine work of
Maso of Brescia; I should be loth for it to cover the heart
of a scoundrel. I must know who is to wear it."

" Well, then, to be plain with you, Niccolo mio, I want
it myself," said Tito, knowing it was useless to try per-
suasion. "The fact is, I am likely to have a journey to
take — and yon know what journeying is in these times.
You don't suspect me of treason against the Republic?"

"No, I know no harm of you," said Niccolo, in his
blunt way again. "But have you the money to pay for
the coat?"' For you've passed my shop often enough to
know my sign: you've seen the burning account-books. I
trust nobody. The price is twenty florins, and that's
because it's second-hand. You're not likely to^ have so
much money with you. Let it be till to-morrow."

" I happen to have the money," said Tito, who had been
winning at play the day before, and had not emptied his
purse. " I'll carry the armor home with me."

Niccolo reached down the finely- wrought coat, which
fell together into little more than two handfuls.

" There, then," he said, when the florins had been told

230 KOMOLA.

down on his palm. "■ Take the coat. It's made to cheat
sword, or poniard, or arrow. But, for my part, I would
never put such a thing on. It's like carrying fear about
with one."

Niccolo's words had an unpleasant intensity of meaning
for Tito. But he smiled and said —

"Ah, Niccolu, we scholars are all cowards. Handling
the pen doesn't thicken the arni as vour hammer-wielding
does. Addio!"

He folded the armor under his mantle, and hastened
across the Ponte Rubaconte.

CHAPTER XXVII.

THE YOUNG WIFE.

While Tito was hastening across the bridge with the
new-bought armor under his mantle, Romola was pacing
up and down the old library, thinking of him and longing
for his return.

It was but a few fair faces that had not looked forth
from windows that day to see the entrance of the French
king and his nobles. One of the few was Romola's. She
had been present at no festivities since her father had
died — died quite suddenly in his chair three months before.

" Is not Tito coming to write? " he had said, when the
bell had long ago sounded the usual hour in the evening.
He had not asked before, from dread of a negative; but
Romola had seen by his listening face and restless move-
ments that nothing else was in his mind.

*' No, father, he had to go to a supper at the cardinal's:
you know he is wanted so much by everyone," she answered,
in a tone of gentle excuse.

"Ah I then perhaps he will bring some positive word
about the library; the cardinal promised last week," said
Bardo, apparently p.icified by this hope.

He was silent a little while; then, suddenly flushing, he
said —

" I must go on without him, Romola. Get the pen.
He has brought me no new text to comment on; but I must
say what I want to say about the New Platonists. I shall
die and nothing will have been done. Make haste, my
Romola."

THE YOUNG WIFE, 23i

''I am ready, father," she said, the next minute, holding
the pen in her hand.

But there was silence. Romola took no note of this for
a little while, accustomed to pauses in dictation; and when
at last she looked round inquiringly, there was no change
of attitude.

"I am quite ready, father!"

Still Bardo was silent, and his silence was never again
broken.

Eomola looked back on that hour with some indignation
against herself, because even with the first outburst of her
sorrow there had mingled the irrepressible thought, ''Per-
haps my life with Tito will be more perfect now."

For the dream of a triple life with an undivided sum of
happiness had not been quite fulfilled. The rainbow-
tinted shower of sweets, to have been perfectly typical,
should have had some invisible seeds of bitterness mingled
with them; the crowned Ariadne, under the snowing
roses, had felt more and more the presence of unexpected
thorns. It was not Tito's fault, Romola had continually
assured herself. He was still all gentleness to her, and to
her father also. But it was in the nature of things — she
saw it clearly now — it was in the nature of things that no
one but herself could go on month after month, and year
after year, fulfilling patiently all her father's monotonous
exacting demands. Even she, whose sympathy with her
father had made all the passion and religion of her young
years, had not always been patient, had been inwardly
very rebellious. It was true that before their marriage,
and even for some time after, Tito had seemed more
unwearying than herself; but then, of course, the effort
had the ease of novelty. We assume a load with confi-
dent readiness, and up to a certain point the growing
irksomeness of pressure is tolerable: but at last the desire
for relief can no longer be resisted. Romola said to her-
self that she had Ijeen very foolish and ignorant in her
girlish time: she was wiser now, and would make no
unfair demands on the man to whom she had given her
best woman's love and Avorship. The breath of sadness
that still cleaved to her lot while she saw her father month
after month sink from elation into new disappointment as
Tito gave him less and less of his time, and made bland
excuses for not continuing his own share of the joint
work — that sadness was no fault of Tito's, she said, but
rather of their inevitable destinv. If he staved less and

232 ROMOLA.

less with her, why, that was because they could hardly
ever be alone. His caresses were no less tender: if she
pleaded timidly on any one evening that he should stay
with her father instead of going to another engagement
which was not peremptory, he excused himself with such
charming gaiety, he seemed to linger about her with such
fond playfulness before he could quit her, that she could
only feel a little heartache in the midst of her love, and
then go to her father and try to soften his vexation and dis-
appointment. But all the while inwardly her imagination
was busy trying to see how Tito could be as good as she
had thought he was, and yet find it impossible to sacrifice
those jDleasures of society which were necessarily more
vivid to a bright creature like him than to the common
run of men. She herself would have liked more gaiety,
more admiration: it was true, she gave it up willingly for
lier father's sake — she would have given wp much more
than that for the sake even of a slight wish on Tito's part.
It was clear that there natures differed widely; but per-
haps it was no more than the inherent difference between
man and woman, that made her affections more absorbing.
If there were any other difference she tried to persuade
lierself that the inferiority was all on her side. Tito was
really kinder than she was, better tem23ered, less proud
and resentful; he had no angry retorts, he met all com-
jilaints with perfect sweetness; he only escaped as quietly
as he could from things that were unpleasant.

It belongs to every large nature, when it is not under
the immediate power of some strong unquestioning emo-
tion, to suspect itself, and doubt the truth of its own
impressions, conscious of possibilities beyond its own
horizon. And Eomola was urged to doubt herself the
more by the necessity of interpreting her disaj^pointment
in her life with Tito so as to satisfy at once her love and
her pride. Disappointed? Yes, there was no other milder
word that would tell tlie truth. Perhaps all women had
to suffer the disappointment of ignorant hopes, if she
only knew their experience. Still, there had been some-
thing peculiar in her lot: her relation to her father had
claimed unusual sacrifices from her husband. Tito had
once thought that his love would make those sacrifices
easy; his love had not been great enough for that. She
was not justified in resenting a self-delusion. No! resent-
ment must not rise: all endurance seemed easy to Eomola
rather than a state of mind in which she would admit to

THE TOUNQ WIFE. 233

herself that Tito acted unworthily. If she had felt a new
heartache in the solitary hours with her father through
the last months of his life, it had been by no inexcusa-
ble fault of her husband's; and now — it was a hope that
would make its presence felt even in the first moments
when her father's place was empty — there was no longer
any importunate claim to divide her from Tito; their
young lives would flow in one current, and their true
marriage would begin.

But the sense of something like guilt toward her father
in a hope that grew out of his death, gave all the more
force to the anxiety with which she dwelt on the means of
fulfilling his supreme wish. That piety toward his mem-
ory was all the atonement she could made now for a
thought that seemed akin to joy at his loss. The laborious
simple life, pure from vulgar corrupting ambitions, embit-
tered by the frustration of the dearest hopes, imprisoned
at last in total darkness — a long seed-time without a har-
vest— was at an end now, and all that remained of it
beside the tablet in Sante Croce and the unfinished com-
mentary on Tito's text, was the collection of manuscripts
and antiquities, the fruit of half a century's toil and
frugality. The fulfillment of her father's life-long ambi-
tion about this library was a sacramental obligation for
Romola.

The precious relic was safe from creditors, for when the
xleficit toward their payment had been ascertained, Ber-
nardo del Xero, though he was far from being among the
wealthiest Florentines, had advanced the necessary sum of
about a thousand florins — a large sum in those days —
accepting a lien on the collection as a security.

"The State will repay me," he had said to Eomola,
making light of the sejvice, which had really cost him
some inconvenience. "If the cardinal finds a building,
as he seems to say he will, our Signoria may consent to do
the rest, I have no children, I can aiford the risk."

But within the last ten days all hopes in the Medici had
come to an end: and the famous Medicean collections in
the Via Larga were themselves in danger of dispersion.
French agents had already begun to see that such very fine
antique gems as Lorenzo had collected belonged by right
to the first nation in Europe; and the Florentine State,
which had got possession of the Medicean librar}^, was
likely to be glad of a customer for it. With a war to
recover Pisa hanging over it, and with the certainty of

234 EOMOLA.

having to pay large suljsidies to the French king, the State
was likely to prefer money to manuscripts.

To Romola these grave political changes had gathered
their chief interest from their bearing on the fulfilment of
her father's wish. She had been brought up in learned
seclusion from the interests of actual life, and had been
accustomed to think of heroic deeds and great principles
as something antithetic to the vulgar present, of the Pynx
and the Forum as something more worthy of attention
than the councils of living Florentine men. And now the
expulsion of the Medici meant little more for her than
the extinction of her best hope about her father's library.
The times, she knew, were unpleasant for friends of tlie
iVIedici, like her godfather and Tito: superstitious shop-
keepers and the stupid rabble were full of saspicions; but
her new keen interest in public events, in the outbreak of
WHY, in the issue of the French king's visit, in the changes
that were likely to happen in the State, was kindled solely
by tlie sense of love and duty to her father's memory. All
Romola's ardor had been concentrated in her affections.
Her share in her father's learned pursuits had been for her
"ittle more than a toil which was borne for his sake; and
Tito's airy brilliant faculty had no attraction for her that
ivas not merged in the deeper sympathies that belong to
young love and trust. Romola had had contact with no
mind that could stir the larger possibilities of her nature;
Uiey lay folded and crushed like embryonic wings, making
ao element in her consciousness beyond an occasional
rague uneasiness.

But this new personal interest of hers in public affairs
had made her care at least to understand precisely what
influence Fra Girolamo's preaching was likely to have on
the turn of events. Changes in the form of the State
were talked of, and all she could learn from Tito, whose
secretaryship and serviceable talents carried him into the
heart of public business, made her only the more eager to
fill out her lonely day by going to hear for herself what it
was that was just now leading all Florence by the ears.
Tliis morning, for the first time, she had been to hear one
of the Advent sermons in the Duomo. When Tito had
left her, she had formed a sudden resolution, and after vis-
iting the spot where her father was buried in Santa Croce,
had walked on to the Duomo. The memory of that last
scene witli Dino was still vivid within her whenever she
recalled it, but it had receded behind the experience and

THE YOUNG WIFE. 235

anxieties of her married life. The new sensibilities and
questions which it had half awakened in her were quieted
again by that subjection to her husband's mind which is
felt by every wife who loves her husband with passionate
devotednees and full reliance. She remembered the effect
of Fra G-irolamo's voice and presence on her as a ground
for expecting that his sermon might move her in spite of
his being a narrow-minded monk. But the sermon did
no more than slightly deepen her previous impression, that
this fanatical preacher of tribulations was after all a man
toward whom it might be possible for her to feel personal
regard and reverence. The denunciations and exhorta-
tions simply arrested her attention. She felt no terror, no
pangs of conscience: it was the roll of distant thunder,
that seemed grand, but could not shake her. But when
she heard Savonarola invoke martyrdom, she sobbed with
the rest: she felt herself penetrated with a new sensation —
a strange sympathy with something apart from all the
definable interests of her life. It was not altogether unlike
the thrill which had accompanied certain rare heroic
touches in history and poetry; but the resemblance was as
that between the memory of music, and the sense of being
possessed by actual vibrating harmonies.

But that transient emotion, strong as it was, seemed to
lie quite outside the inner chamber and sanctuary of her
life. She was not thinking of Fra Girolamo now;"^she was
listening anxiously for the step of her husband. During
these three months of their double solitude she had
thought of each day as an epoch in which their union
might begin to be more perfect. She was conscious of
being sometimes a little too sad or too urgent about what
concerned her father's memory — a Ittle too critical or
coldly silent when Tito narrated the things that were said
and done in the world he frequented— a little too hastv in
suggesting that by living quite simplv as her father had
done, they might become rich enough to pav Bernardo del
Xero, and reduce the difficulties about the librarv. It was
not possible that Tito could feel so strongly on thislast point
as she did, and it was asking a great deal from him to give up
luxuries for which he really labored. The next time Tito
came home she would be*^ careful to suppress all those
promi^tings that seemed to isolate her from him. Eomola
was laboring, as a loving woman must, to subdue her nature
to her husband's. The great need of her heart compelled
her to strangle, with desperate resolution, every rising

236 ROMOLA.

impulse of suspicion, pride, and resentment; she felt equal
to any self -infliction tnat would save her from ceasing to
love. That would have been like the hideous nightmare
in which the world had seemed to break away all round
her, and leave her feet overhanging the darkness. Eomola
had never distinctly imagined such a future for herself;
she was only beginning to feel the jDresence of effort in
that clinging trust which had once been mere repose.

She waited and listened long, for Tito had not come
straight home after leaving Niccolo Caparra, and it was
more than two hours after the time when he was crossing
the Ponte Eubaconte that Romola heard the great door of
the court turning on its hinges, and hastened to the head of
the stone steps. There was a lamp hanging over the stairs,
and they could see each other distinctly as he ascended.
The eighteen months had produced a more definable change
in Romola's face than in Tito's; the expression was more
subdued, less cold, and more beseeching, and, as the pink
flush overspread her face now, in her joy that the long wait-
ing was at an end, she was much lovelier than on the day
when Tito had first seen her. On that day, any on-looker
would have said that Romola's nature was made to com-
mand, and Tito's to bend; yet now Romola's mouth was
quivering a little, and there was some timidity in her glance.

He made an effort to smile, as she said —

"My Tito, you are tired; it has been a fatiguing day: is
it not true?"

Maso was there, and no more was said until they had
crossed the ante-chamber and closed the door of the library
behind them. The wood was burning brightly on the great
dogs; that was one welcome for Tito, late as he was, and
Romola's gentle voice was another.

He just turned and kissed her when she took off his
mantle; then he went toward a high-backed chair placed
for him near the fire, threw himself into it, and flung
away his cap, saying, not peevishly, but in a fatigued tone
of remonstrance, as he gave a slight shudder —

"Romola, I wish you would give up sitting in this
library. Surely our own rooms are pleasanter in this chill
weather."

Romola felt hurt. She had never seen Tito so indifferent
in his manner; he was usually full of lively solicitous
attention. And she had thought so much of his return to
her after the long day's absence! He must be very weary.

"I wonder you have forgotten, Tito," slie answered.

THE YOUNG WIFE. 237

looking at liim anxiously, as if she wanted to read an
excuse for him in the signs of bodily fatigue. ''You
know I am making the catalogue on the new plan that my
father wished for; you have not time to help me, so I must
work at it closely."

Tito, instead of meeting Romola's glance, closed his eyeS
and rubbed his hands over his face and hair. He felt he
was behaving unlike himself, but he would make amends
to-morrow. The terrible resurrection of secret fears,
ivhich, if Romola had known them, would have alienated
her from him forever, caused him to feel an alienation
already begun between them — caused him to feel a certain
repulsion toward a woman from whose mind he was in
danger. The feeling had taken hold of him unawares, and
he was vexed with himself for behaving in this new cold
way to her. He could not suddenly command any affec-
tionate looks or words; he could only exert himself to say
what might serve as an excuse.

" I am not well, Romola; you must not be surprised if I
am peevish."

'•Ah, you have had so much to tire you to-day," said
Romola, kneeling down close to him, and laying her arm
on his chest while she put his hair back caressingly.

Suddenly she drew her arm away with a start, and a gaze
of alarmed inquiry.

"What have you got under your tunic, Tito? Some-
thing as hard as iron."

"it is iron — it is chain armor," he said at once. He
was prepared for the surprise and the question, and he
spoke quietly, as of something that he was not hurried to
explain. ^^

"There was some unexpected danger to-day, then?
said Romola, in a tone of conjecture. " You had it lent
to you for the procession."

"No; it is my own. I shall be obliged to wear it
constantly, for some time."

" What is it that threatens you, my Tito?" said Romola,
looking terrified, and clinging to him again.

"Every one is threatened in these times, who is not a
•rabid enemy of the Medici. Don't look distressed, my
Romola^this armor will make me safe against covert
attacks."

Tito put his hand on her neck and smiled. This little
dialogue about the armor had broken through the new
crust, and made a channel for the sweet habit of kindness.

338 BOMOLA.

''But my godfather, then," said Romola, "is not he,
too, in danger? And he takes no precautions — ought he
not? since he must surely be in more danger than you,
who have so little influence compared with him."

"It is just because I am less important that I am in
more danger," said Tito, readily. " I am suspected con-
stantly of being an envoy. And men like Messer Bernardo
are protected by their position and their extensive family
connections, which spread among all parties, while I am a
Greek that nobody would avenge."

" But, Tito, is it a fear of some particular person, or
only a vague sense of danger, that has made you think of
Avearing this? " Romola was unable to repel the idea of a
degrading fear in Tito, which mingled itself with her
anxiety.

"I have had special threats," said Tito, "but I must
beg you to be silent on the subject, my Romola. I shall
consider that you have broken my confidence, if you
mention it to your godfather."

"Assuredly I will not mention it," said Romola, blush-
ing, "if you wish it to be a secret. But, dearest Tito,"
she added, after a moment's pause, in a tone of loving-
anxiety, "it will make you very wretched."

" Wliat will make me wretched? " he said, with a scarcely
perceptible movement across his face, as from some darting
sensation.

" This fear — this heavy armor. I can't help shuddering
as I feel it under my arm. I could fancy it a story of
enchantment — that some malignant fiend had changed your
sensitive human skin into a hard shell. It seems so unlike
my bright, light-hearted Tito!"

" Then you would rather have your husband exposed to
danger, when he leaves you?" said Tito, smiling. "If
you don't mind my being poniarded or shot, why need I
mind? I will give up the armor — shall I?"

"No, Tito, no. I am fanciful. Do not heed what I
have said. But such crimes are surely not common in
Florence? I have always heard my father and godfather
say so. Have they become frequent lately?"

" It is not unlikely that they will become frequent, with
the bitter hatreds that are being bred continually."

Romola was silent for a few moments. She shrank from
insisting further on the subject of the armor. She tried
to shake it oil.

THE YOUNG WIFE. 339

''Tell me what has happened today," she said, in a
cheerful tone. " Has all gone off well?"

"Excellently well. First of all, the rain came and put
an end to Luca Corsini's oration, which nobody wanted to
hear, and a ready-tongued personage — some say it Avas
Gaddi, some say it was Melema, but really it was done so
quickly no one knows who it Avas — had the honor of giving
the Christianissimo the briefest possible welcome in bad
French."

"Tito, it was you, I know," said Romola, smiling
brightly, and kissing him. ''How is it you never care
about claiming anything? And after that?"

"Oh! after that, there was a shower of armor and
jewels, and trappings, such as you saw at the last Floren-
tine giostra, only a great deal more of them. There was
strutting, and prancing, and confusion, and scrambling,
and the people shouted, and the Cristianissimo smiled
from ear to ear. And after that there was a great deal of
flattery, and eating, and play. I was at Tornabuoni's. I
Avill tell you about it to-morrow."

" Yes, dearest, never mind noAV. But is there any more
hope that things will end peaceably for Florence, that the
Republic will not get into fresh troubles?"

Tito gave a shrug. "Florence Avill have no peace but
what it pays well for; that is clear."

Romola's face saddened, but she checked herself, and said,
cheerfully, " You would not guess where I went to-day,
Tito. I Avent to the Duomo, to hear Fra Girolamo."

Tito looked startled; he had immediately thought of
Baldassarre's entrance into the Duomo; but Romola gave
his look another meaning.

"You are surprised, are you not? It was a sudden
thought. I Avant to know all about the public affairs now,
and I determined to hear for myself what the Frate
promised the people about this French invasion."
"Well, and Avhat did you think of the prophet?"
"He certainly has a very mysterious poAver, that man.
A great deal of his sermon was Avhat I expected; but once
I Avas strangely moved — I sobbed with the rest."

"Take care, Romola," said Tito, playfully, feeling re-
lived that she had said nothing about Baldassarre; "you
have a touch of fanaticism in you. I shall have you
seeing visions, like your brother."

"No; it Avas the same Avith every one else. He carried
them all with him; unless it were that gross Dolfo Spini,

'i40 EOilOLA.

Avhom I saw tliere making grimaces. There was even a
wretched-looking man, with a rope round his neck — an
escaped prisoner, I should think, who had run in for
shelter — a very wild-eyed old man: I saw him with great
tears rolling down his cheeks, as he looked and listened
quite eagerly.'''

There v/as a slight pause before Tito spoke.

"I saw the man," he said, — ''the prisoner. I was
outside the Duomo with Lorenzo Tornabuoni when he ran
in. He had escaped from a French soldier. Did you see
him when you came out?"

"No, he went out with our good old Piero di Cosimo.
I saw Piero come in and cut off his roi^e, and take him
out of the church. But you Avant rest, Tito? You feel
ill?"

"Yes," said Tito, rising. The horrible sense that he
must live in continual dread of what Baldassarre had said
or done pressed upon him like a cold weight.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

THE PAINTED RECORD.

Four days later, Romola was on her way to the house of
Piero di Cosimo, in the Via Golfonda. Some of the streets
through which she had to pass were lined with Frenchmen
who were gazing at Florence, and with Florentines who
were gazing at the French, and the gaze was not on either
side entirely friendly and admiring. The fist nation in
Europe, of necessity finding itself, when out of its own
country, in the presence of general inferiority, naturally
assumed an air of conscious pre-eminence: and the Flor-
entines, who had taken such pains to jalay the host amia-
bly, were getting into the worst humor with their too
superior guests.

For after the first smiling compliments and festivities
were over — after wondrous mysteries with unrivaled ma-
chinery of floating clouds and angels had been presented
in churches — after the royal guest had honored Florentine
dames with much of his Most Christian ogling at balls and
suppers, and business hud begun to l)e talked of — it ap-
peared that the new Charlemagne regarded Florence as a

THE PAINTED KECORD. 241

conquered city, inasmuch as he had entered it with his
lance at rest, talked of leaving his viceroy behind him, and
had thoughts of bringing back the Medici. Singular logic
this appeared to be, on the part of an elect instrument of
God! since tlie policy of Piero de Medici, disowned by the
people, had been the only offense of Florence against the
majesty of France. And Florence was determined not to
submit. The determination was being expressed very
strongly in consultations of citizens inside the Old Palace,
and it was beginning to show itself on the broad flags of
the streets and piazza wherever there was an opportunity
of flouting an insolent Frenchman. Under these circum-
stances the streets were not altogether a pleasant prom-
enade for well-born women; but Romola, shrouded in her
black veil and mantle, and with old Maso by her side, felt
secure enough from impertinent observation.

And she was impatient to visit Piero di Cosimo. A copy
of her father's portrait as CEdipus, which he had long ago
undertaken to make for her, was not yet finished; and
Piero was so uncertain in his work — sometimes, when -the
demand was not peremptory, laying aside a picture for
months; sometimes thrusting it into a corner or coffer,
where it was likely to be utterly forgotten — that she felt it
necessary to watch over his progress. She was a favorite
with the painter, and he was inclined to fulfil any wish of
hers, but no general inclination could be trusted as a safe-
guard against his sudden whims. He had told her the
week before that the picture would perhaps be finished by
this time; and Romola was nervously anxious to have in
her possession a copy of the only portrait existing of her
father in the days of his blindness, lest his image should
grow dim in her mind. The sense of defect in her devo-
tedness to him made her cling with all the force of com-
punction as well as affection to the duties of memory. Love
does not aim simply at the conscious good of the beloved
object: it is not satisfied without perfect loyalty of heart;
it aims at its own completeness.

Romola, by special favor, was allowed to intrude upon
the painter without previous notice. She lifted the iron
slide and called Piero in a flute-like tone, as the little
maiden with the eggs had done in Tito's presence. Piero
was quick in answering, but when he opened the door he
accounted for his quickness in a manner that was not
com]3limentary.
16

24:'Z KOMOLA.

"All, Madonna Komola, is it you? I thought my eggs
were come; I wanted them."

''I have brought you something better than hard eggs,
Piero. Maso has got a little basket full of cakes and
confetti for you," said Romola, smiling, as she put back
her veil. She took the basket from Maso, and stepping
into the house said —

"■ I know you like tliese things when you can have them
without trouble. Confess you do."

" Yes, when they come to me as easily as the light does,"
said Piero, folding his arms and looking down at the sweet-
meats as Eomola uncovered them and glanced at him
archly. ''And they are come along with the light now,"
he added, lifting his eyes to her face and hair with a
painter's admiration, as her hood, dragged by the weight
of her veil, fell backward.

"But I know what the sweetmeats are for," he went
on; "they are to stop my mouth while you scold me.
Well, go on into the next room, and you will see Fve done
something to the picture since you saw it, though it's not
finished yet. But I didn't promise, you know: I take care
not to promise:

' Chi promette e non mantiene
L'anima sua non va raai bene.'' "

The door opening on the wild garden was closed now,
and the painter was at work. Not at Komola's picture,
however. That was standing on the floor, propped against
the wall, and Piero stooped to lift it, that he might carry
it into the proper light. But in lifting away this picture,
he had disclosed another — the oil-sketch of Tito, to which
he had made an important addition within the last few
days. It was so much smaller than the other picture,
that it stood far -within it, and Piero, apt to forget where
he had placed anything, Was not aware of what he had
revealed, as, peering at some detail in the painting which
he held in his hands, he went to place it on an easel. But
Eomola exclaimed, flushiug with astonishment —

"That is Tito!"

Piero looked round, and gave a silent shrug. He was
vexed at his own forgetfulness.

She was still looking at the sketch in astonishment; but
presently she turned toward the painter, and said with
puzzled alarm —

"What a strange picture! When did you paint it?
What does it mean?"

THE PAIJSTEO KECOKD. 343

'' A mere fancy of mine/" said Piero, lifting off his skull-
cap, scratching his head, and making the usual grimace by
which he avoided the betrayal of any feeling. '*I Avanted
a handsome young face for it, and your husband's was just
the thing."

He went forward, stooped down to the picture, and lift-
ing it away with its back to Romola, pretended to be giv-
ing it a passing examination, before putting it aside as a
thing not good enough to show.

But Romola, who had the fact of the armor in her
mind, and was penetrated by this strange coincidence of
things which associated Tito with the idea of fear, went to
his elbow and said —

"Don't put it away; let me look again. That man with
the rope round his neck — I saw him — I saw you come to
him in the Duomo. What was it that made you put him
into a picture with Tito?"

Piero saw no better resource than to tell part of the
truth.

" It was a mere accident. The man was running away —
miming uj? the steps, and caught hold of your husband;
I suppose he had stumbled. I happened to be there, and
saw it, and I thought the savage-looking old fellow was a
good subject. But it's worth nothing — it's only a freakish
.daub of mine." Piero ended contemptuously, moving the
sketch away with an air of decision, and putting it on a
high-shelf. " Come and look at the Qi^dipus."

He had shown a little too much anxiety in putting the
sketch out of her sight, and had produced the very impression
he liad sought to prevent — that there was really something
unpleasant, something disadvantageous to Tito, in the cir-
cumstances out of which the picture arose. But this
impression silenced her: her pride and delicacy shrank
from questioning further, where questions might seem to
imply that she could entertain even a slight suspicion
against her husband. She merely said, in as quiet a tone
as she could —

•' He was a strange piteous-looking man, that prisoner,
Do you know anything more of him?"

"Xo more: I showed him the way to the hospital, that's
all. See, now, the face of CEdipus is pretty nearly fin-
ished: tell me what you tliink of it."

Romola now gave her whole attention to her father's
portrait, standing in long silence before it.

*' Ah," she said at last, "you have done what I wanted.

244 ROMOLA.

You have given it more of the listening look. My good
Piero " — she turned toward him with briglit moist eyes —
"I am very grateful to you."

"Now that's what I can't bear in you women," said
Piero, turning impatiently, and kicking aside the objects
that littered the floor — " you are always pouring out feel-
ings M'here there's no call for them. Why should you be
grateful to me for a picture you pay me for, especially
when I make you wait for it? And if I 2:iaint a picture, I
suppose it's for my own pleasure and credit to paint it well,
eh? Are you to thank a man for not being a rogue or a
noodle? It's enough if he himself thanks Messer Dome-
neddio, who has made him neither the one nor the other.
But women think walls are held together with honey."

"You crusty Piero! I forgot how snappish you are.
Here, put this nice sweetmeat in your mouth," said
Romola, smiling through her tears, and taking something
very crisp and sweet from the little basket.

Piero accepted it very much as that proverbial bear
that dreams of pears might accept an exceedingly mellow
"swan-egg" — really liking the gift, but accustomed to
have his pleasures and pains concealed under a shaggy
coat.

"It's good. Madonna Antigone," said Piero, putting
his fingers in the basket for another. He had eaten
nothing but hard eggs for a fortnight. Romola stood
opposite him, feeling her new anxiety suspended for a
little while by the sight of this naive enjoyment.

"Good-bye, Piero," she said, presently, setting down
the basket. "I promise not to thank you if you finish
the portrait soon and well. I will tell you, you were
bound to do it for your own credit."

"Good," said Piero, curtly, helping her with much
deftness to fold her mantle and veil round her.

"I'm glad she asked no more questions about that
sketch," he thought, when he had closed the door behind
her. "I should be sorry for her to guess that I thought
her fine husband a good model for a coward. But I made
light of it; she'll not think of it again."

Piero was too sanguine, as open-hearted men are apt to
be when they attempt a little clever simulation. The
tliought of the picture pressed more and more on Romola
as she walked homeward. She could not help putting
together the two facts of the chain-armor and the en-
counter mentioned by Piero between her husband and ihe

A MOMENT OF TRIUMPH.

246

prisoner, which had happened on the morning of the day
when the armor was adopted. That look ot terror which
the painter had given Tito, had he seen it? What could
it all mean?

''It means nothing," she tried to assure herseit. _ it
was a mere coincidence. Shall I ask Tito ahout it?"
Her mind said at last, "No: I will not question him
about anything he did not tell me spontaneously. It_ is
an offence against the trust I owe him." Her heart said,
"I dare not ask him." . ■ i ^

There was a terrible flaw in the trust: she was alraid ot
any hasty movement, as men are who hold something
precious and want to believe that it is not broken.

CHAPTEE XXIX.

A MOMENT OF TRIUMPH.

"The old fellow has vanished; went on toward Arezzo
the next morning ; not liking the smell of the French, I
suppose, after being their prisoner. I went to the hospital
to inquire after him ; I wanted to know if those broth-
making monks had found out whether he was in his right
mind or not. However, they said he showed no signs of
madness — only took no notice of questions, and seemed
to be planting a vine twenty miles off. He was a myste-
rious old tiger. I should have liked to know something
more about him."

It was in Nello's shop that Piero di Cosimo was speaking,
on the twenty-fourth of November, just a week after the
entrance of the French. There was a party of six or seven
assembled at the rather unusual hour of three m the after-
noon; for it was a day on which all Florence was excited
by the prospect of some decisive political event. Every
lounging-place was full, and every shopkeeper who had no
wife or deputy to leave in charge, stood at his door with
his thumbs in his belt; while the streets were constantly
sprinkled with artisans pausing or passing lazily like
floating splinters, ready to rush forward impetuously it
any object attracted them.

Nello had been thrumming the lute as he half sat on
the board against the shop-window, and kept an outlook
toward the piazza.

246 ROMOLA.

'•All," lie said, laying down the lute, with emphasis, *■'!
would not for a gold florin have missed that sight of the
French soldiers waddling in their broad shoes after their
runaway prisoners! That comes of leaving my shop to
shave magnificent chins. It is always so: if ever I quit
this navel of the earth something takes the opportunity of
happening in my piazza."

''Yes, you ought to have been there, said Piero, in his
biting way, "just to see your favorite Greek look as
frightened as if 8atanasso had laid hold of him. I like
to see your ready-smiling Messeri caught in a sudden wind
and obliged to show their lining in spite of themselves.
What color do you tliink a man's liver is, Avho looks like
a bleached deer as soon as a chance stranger lays hold of
him suddenly?"

"Piero, keep that vinegar of thine as sauce to thine
own eggs! What is it against my M erndito that he looked
startled when he felt a pair of claws upon him and saw an
unchained madman at his elbow? Your scholar is not
like those beastly Swiss and Germans, whose heads are
only fit for battering-rams, and who have such large appe-
tites that they think nothing of taking a cannon-ball
before breakfast. We Florentines count some other quali-
ties in a man besides that vulgar stuff called bravery,
which is to be got by hiring dunderheads at so much per
dozen. I tell you, as soon as men found out that they
had more brains than oxen, they set the oxen to draw for
them; and when we Florentines found out that we had
more brains than other men we set them to fight for us."

"Treason, Nello!" a voice called out from the inner
sanctum; "that is not the doctrine of the State. Florence
is grinding its weapons; and the last well-authenticated
vision announced by the Frate was Mars standing on the
Palazzo Vecchio with his arm on the shoulder of San -Gio-
vanni Battista, who was offering him a piece of honey-
comb."

"It is well, Francesco," said Nello. "Florence has a
few thicker skulls than may do to Bombard Pisa Avith;
there will still be the finer spirits left at home to do the
thinking and the shaving. And as for our Piero, here, if
he makes such a point of valor, let him carry his biggest
brush for a weapon and his palette for a shield, and chal-
lenge the widest-mouthed Swiss he can see in the Prato to
a single combat."

"Va, Nello," growled Piero, "thy tongue runs on as

A MOMENT OF TRIUMPH. 247

usual, like a mill when the Aruo's full — whether there's
grist or not."

" Excellent grist, I tell thee. For it would be as reason-
able to expect a grizzled painter like thee to be fond of
getting a javelin inside thee as to expect a man whose wits
have been sharpened on the classics to like having his
handsome face clawed by a wild beast."

" There you go, supposing yon will get people to put
their legs into a sack because you call it a pair of hosen,"
said Piero. "Who said anything about a wild beast, or
about an unarmed man rushing on battle? Fighting is a
trade, and it's not my trade. I should be a fool to run
after danger, but I could face it if it came to me."

"How is it you're so afraid of the thunder, then, my
Piero?" said Xello, determined to chase down the accuser.
"You ought to be able to understand why one man is
shaken by a thing that seems a trifle to others — you who
hide yourself with the rats as soon as a storm comes on."

"That is because I have a particular sensibility to loud
sounds; it has nothing to do with my courage or my con-
science."

" Well, and Tito Melema may have a peculiar sensibility
to being laid hold of unexpectedly by prisoners who have
run away from French soldiers. Men are born with antip-
athies; I myself can't abide tlie smell of mint. Tito was
born with an antipathy to old prisoners Avho stumble and
clutch. Ecco!"

There was a general laugh at Nello's defence, and it was
clear that Piero's disinclination toward Tito was not shared
by the company. The painter, with his undecipherable
grimace, took the tow from his scarsella and stuffed his
ears in indignant contempt, while Nello went on triumph-
antly—

"'Xo, my Piero, I can't afford to have my hel erudito
decried; and Florence can't afford it either, with her schol-
ars moulting off her at the early age of forty. Our Pho?-
nix Pico, just gone straight to Paradise, as the Frate has
informed us; and the incomparable Poliziano, not two

months since, gone to well, well, let us hope he is not

gone to the eminent scholars in the Malebolge."

"By the way," said Francesco Cei, "have you heard
that Camilla Rucillai lias outdone the Frate in her proph-
ecies? She prophesied two years ago that Pico would die
in the time of lilies. He has died in November. ' Xot at
all the time of lilies,' said the scorners. 'Go to I' says

5348 ROMOLA.

Camilla; ' it is the lilies of France I meant, and it seems
to me they are close enough under your nostrils.' I say,
' Euge, Camilla! ' If the Frate can prove that any one of
his visions has been as well fulfilled. Til declare myself a
Piagnone to-morrow."

" You are something too flippant about the Frate, Fran-
cesco," said Pietro Cenniui, the scholarly. ''We are all
indebted to him in these weeks for preaching peace and
quietness, and the laying aside of party quarrels. They
are men of small discernment who would be glad to see the
people slipping the Frate's leash just now. And if the
Most Christian King is obstinate about the treaty to-day,
and will not sign what is fair and honorable to Florence,
Fra Girolamo is the man we must trust in to bring him to
reason."

"You speak truth, Messer Pietro," said Nello: "the
Frate is one of the firmest nails Florence has to hang on —
at least, that is the opinion of the most respectable chins
I have the honor of shaving. But young Messer Niccolo
was saying here the other morning — and doubtless Fran-
cesco means the same thing — there is as wonderful a poA^er
of stretching in the meaning of visions as in Dido's bull's
hide. It seems to me a dream may mean whatever comes
after it. As our Franco Sacchetti says, a woman dreams
over night of a serpent biting her, breaks a drinking-cui)
the next day, and cries out, ' Look you, I thought some-
thing would hapjien — it's plain now what the serpent
meant.' "

"But the Frate's visions are not of that sort," said
Cronaca. "He not only says what will happen — that the
Church will be scourged and renovated, and the heathens
converted — he says it shall happen quickly. He is no
slippery pretender who provides loop-holes for himself,
he is "

"What is this? what is this? exclaimed Nello, Jumping
off the board, and putting his head out at the door. " Here
are })eople streaming into the piazza, and shouting. Some-
thing must have happened in the Via Larga. Aha!" he
burst forth, with delighted astonishment, stepping out
laughing and waving his cap.

All the rest of the company hastened to the door. News
from the Via Larga was just what they had been waiting
for. But if the news had come into the piazza, they were
not a little surprised at the form of its advent. Carried
above the shoulders of the people, on a bench apparently

A MOMENT OF TRirMPH. 249

snatched up iu the street, sat Tito ^Eelema, in smiling
amusement at the compulsion he was under. His cap had
slipped off his head, and hung by the becchetto which was
wound loosely round his neck; and as he saw the group at
Xello^s door, he lifted up his fingers in beckoning recogni-
tion. The next minute he had leajoed from the bench on
to a cart filled with bales, that stood in the broad sjDace
between the Baptistery and the steps of the Duomo, while
the people swarmed round him with tlie noisy eagerness of
poultry exjjecting to be fed. But there was silence when
he began to speak in his clear mellow voice —

''Citizens of Florence! I have no warrant to tell the
news except your will. But the news is good, and will
harm no man in the telling. The Most Christian King is
signing a treaty that is honorable to Florence. But yoti
owe it to one of your citizens, who siDoke a word worthy of
the ancient Romans — you owe it to Piero Capponi!^^

Immediately there was a roar of voices.

"Capponil Cappouil What said our Piero?" ''Ah! he
wouldn't stand being sent from Herod to Pilate!" "AYe
knew Piero!" " Orsu ! Tell us, what did he say?"

When the roar of insistance had subsided a little, Tito
began again —

"The Most Christian King demanded a little too
much — was obstinate — said at last, 'I shall order my
trumpets to sound.' Then, Florentine citizens! your Piero
Capponi, speaking with the voice of a free city, said, ' If
you sound your trumpets, we will ring our bells!' He
snatched the copy of the dishonoring conditions from the
hands of the secretary, tore it in pieces, and turned to
leave the royal presence."

Again there were loud shouts — and again impatient
demands for more.

" Then, Florentines, the high majesty of France felt,
perhaps for the first time, all the majesty of. a free city.
And the Most Christian King himself hastened from his
place to call Piero Capponi back. The great spirit of
your Florentine city did its work by a great word, without
need of the great actions that lay ready behind it. And
the King has consented to sign the treat3% which preserves
the honor, as well as the safety, of Florence. The banner
of France will float over every Florentine galley in sign of
amity and common privilege, but above that banner will
be written the word 'Liberty!'"

"That is all the news I have to tell: is it not enough? —

;.'5«> ROMOLA.

since it is for the glory of every one of you, citizens of
Florence, that you have u fellow-citizen who knows how to
sjoeak your will/'

As the shouts rose again, Tito looked round with inward
amusement at the various crowd, each of whom was elated
with the notion that Piero Capponi had somehow repre-
sented him — that he was the mind of which Capponi was
the mouthpiece. He enjoyed the humor of the incident,
which had suddenly transformed him, an alien, and a
friend of the Medici, into an orator who tickled the ears
of the people blatant for some unknown good M^hich they
called liberty. He felt quite glad that he had been laid
hold of and hurried along by the crowd as he was com.ing
out of the palace in the Via Larga with a commission to
the Signoria. It was very easy, very pleasant, this exercise
of speaking to the genei-al satisfaction: a man who knew
how to persuade need never be in danger from any party;
he could convince each that he was feigning with all the
others. The gestures and faces of weavers and dyers were
certainly amusing when looked at from above in this way.

Tito was beginning to get easier in his armor, and at this
moment was quite unconscious of it. He stood with one
hand holding his recovered cap, and with the other at his
belt, the light of a comj^lacent smile in his long lustrous
eyes, as he made a parting reverence to his audience, before
springing down from the bales — when suddenly his glance
met that of a man who had not at all the amusing aspect
of the exulting weavers, dyers, and Avool-carders. The
face of this man was clean-shaven, his hair close-clipped,
and he wore a decent felt hat. A single glance would
hardly have sufficed to assure any one but Tito that this
was the face of the escaped prisoner, who had laid hold
of him on the steps. But to Tito it came not simply as
the face of the escaped prisoner, but as a face with which
he had been familiar long years before.

It seemed all compressed into a second — the sight of
Baldassarre looking at him, the sensation shooting through
him like a fiery arrow, and the act of leaping from the
cart. He would have leaped down in the same instant,
whether he had seen Baldassarre or not, for he was in a
hurry to be gone to the Palazzo Vecchio: this time he had
not betrayed himself by look or movement, and he said
inwardly that he could not be taken by surprise again; he
should be jirepared to see this face rise up continually like
the intermittent blotch that comes in diseased vision. But

A MO II EXT OF TRIUMPH. 261

this reappearance of Baldassarre so nuicli more in his own
likeness tightened the pressure of dread: the idea of his
madness lost its likelihood now he was shaven and clad
like a decent though poor citizen. Certainh' there was a
great change in his face; hut how could it be otherwise?
and yet, if he were perfectly sane — in possession of all his
powers and all his learning, why was he lingering in this
way before making known his identity? It must be for
the sake of making his scheme of vengence more complete.
But he did linger: that at least gave an opportunity for
flight. And Tito began to think that flight was his only
resource.

But while he, with his back turned on the Piazza del
Duomo, had lost the recollection of the new j^art he had
been playing, and was no longer thinking of the many
things which a ready brain and tongue made eas}^ but of
a few things which destiny had somehow made very diffi-
cult, the enthusiasm which he had fed contemptuously
was creating a scene in that piazza in grand contrast with
the inward drama of self-centred fear which he had carried
away from it.

The crowd, on Tito's disappearance, had begun to turn
their faces toward the outlets of the piazza in the direction
of the Via Larga, when the sight of inazzieri, or mace-
bearers, entering from the Via de Martelli, announced the
approach of dignitaries. They must be the syndics, or com-
missioners charged with the affecting of the treaty; the
treaty must be already signed, and they had come away from
the royal iDresence. Piero Capponi was coming — the brave
heart that had known how to speak fur Florence. The
effect on the crowd was remarkable; they parted with soft-
ening, dropping voices, subsiding into silence, — and the
silence became so perfect that the tread of the syndics on
the broad pavement, and the rustle of their black silk
garments, could l)e heard, like rain in the night. There
were four of them; but it was not the two learned doctors
of law, Messer Guidantonio Vespucci and Messer Domen-
ico Bonsi, that the crowd waited for; it was not Francesco
Valori, popular as he had become in these late days. The
moment belonged to another man, of firm presence, as
little inclined to humor the people as to humor any other
unreasonable claimants — loving order, like one who by
force of fortune had been made a merchant, and by force
of nature had become a soldier. It was not till he was
seen at the entrance of the piazza that the silence was

352 ROMOLA.

broken, and then one loud shout of "Capponi, Copponi!
Well done, Caponni! "' rang through the piazza.

The simple, resolute man looked round him with grave
joy. His fellow-citizens gave him a great funeral two
years later, when he had died in fight; there were
"torches carried by all the magistracy, and torches again,
and trains of banners. But it was not known that he felt
any joy in the oration that was delivered in his praise, as
the banners waved over his bier. Let us be glad that he
^ot some thanks and praise while he lived.

CHAPTEE XXX.

THE avenger's SECRET.

It was the first time that Baldassarre had been in the
Piazza del Duomo since his escape. He had a strong
desire to hear the remarkable monk preach again, but he
had shrunk from reappearing in the same spot where he
had been seen half naked, with neglected hair, with a rope
round his neck — in the same spot where he had been called
a madman. The feeling, in its freshness, was too strong
to be overcome by any trust he had in the change he had
made in his apjDcarance; for when the words, "' some mad-
man surely," had fallen from Tito's lips, it was not their
baseness and cruelty only that had made their viper
sting — it was Baldassarre 's instantaneous bitter conscious-
ness that he might be unable to ])rove the words false.
Along with the passionate desire for vengeance which
possessed him had arisen the keen sense that his power of
achieving the vengeance Avas doubtful. It was as if Tito
had been helped by some diabolical prompter, who had
whispered Baldassarre's saddest secret in the traitor's ear.
He was not mad; for he carried within him that piteous
stamp of sanity, the clear consciousness of shattered
faculties; he measured his own feebleness. "With the first
movement of vindictive rage awoke a vague caution, like
that of a wild beast tnat is fierce but feeble — or like that
of an insect whose little fragment of earth has given way,
and made it pause in a palsy of distrust. It was this dis-
trust, this detenu illation to take no step which might
betray anything concerning himself, that had made Baldas-
sarre reject Piero di Cosimo's friendly advances.

THE AVEXGER's SEfRET. 253

He had been equally cautious at the hospital, only tell-
ing, in answer to the questions of the brethren there, that
he had been made a prisoner by the French on his way
from Genoa. But his age, and the indications in his
speech and manner that he was of a different class from
the ordinary mendicants and poor travellers who were
entertained in the hospital, had induced the monks to
offer him extra charity: a coarse woolen tunic to protect
him from the cold, a pair of peasant's shoes, and a few
ilanari, smallest of Florentine coins, to help him on
his way. He had gone on the road to Arezzo early in the
morning; but he had paused at the first little town, and
had used a couple of his danari to get himself shaved, and
to have his circle of hair clipped short, in his former
fashion. The barber there had a little hand-mirror of
bright steel: it was a long while, it was years, since Bal-
dassarre had looked at himself, and now, as his eyes fell
on that hand-mirror, a new thought shot through his
mind. "Was he so changed that Tito really did not know
him?" The thought was such a sudden arrest of impet-
uous currents, that it was a painful shock to him ; his hands
shook like a leaf, as he put away the barber's arm and asked
for the mirror. He wished to see himself before he was
shaved. The barber, noticing his tremulousness, held the
mirror for him.

Xo, he was not so changed as that. He himself had
known the wrinkles as they had been three years ago; they
were only deeper now: there was the same rough, clumsy
skin, making little superficial bosses on the brow, like so
many cipher-marks; the skin was only yellower, only
looked more like a lifeless rind. That 'shaggy white
beard — it was no disguise to eyes that had looked closely at
him for sixteen years — to eyes that ought to have searched
for him with the expectation of finding him changed, as
men search for the beloved among the bodies cast up by
the waters. There was something different in his glance,
but it was a difference that should only have made the
recognition of him the more startling; for is not a known
voice all the more thrilling when it is heard as a cry?
But the doubt was folly: he had felt that Tito knew him.
He put out his hand and pushed the mirror away. The
strong currents were rushing on again, and the energies of
hatred and vengeance were active once more.

He went back on the way toward Florence again, but he
did not wish to enter the city till dusk; so he turned aside

254 ROMOLA.

from the highroad, and sat down by a little pool shadowed
on one side by alder-bushes still sprinkled with yellow
leaves. It was a calm November day, and he no sooner
saw the pool than he thought its still surface might be a
mirror for him. He wanted to contemjolate himself slowly,
as he had not dared to do in the presence of the barber.
He sat down on the edge of the pool, and bent forward to
look earnestly at the image of himself.

Was there something wandering and imbecile in his
face — something like what he felt in his mind?

Not now; not when he was examining himself with a
look of eager inquiry: on the contrary, there was an
intense purpose in his eyes. But at other times? Yes, it
must be so: in the long hours when he had the vague
aching of an unremembered past in him — when he seemed
to sit in dark loneliness, visited by whispers which died out
mockingly as he strained his ear after them, and by forms
that seemed to approach him and float away as he thrust
out his hand to grasp them — in those hours, doubtless,
there must be continual frustration and amazement in his
glance. And more horrible still, when the thick cloud
parted for a moment, and, as he sprang forward with hoi^e,
rolled together again, and left him helpless as before;
doubtless, there was then a blank confusion in his face, as
of a man suddenly smitten with blindness.

Could he prove anything? Could he even begin to allege
anything, with the confidence that the links of thought
would not break away? Would any believe that he had
ever had a mind filled with rare knowledge, busy with
close thoughts, ready with various speech? It had all
slipped away from him — that laboriously -gathered store.
Was it utterly and forever gone from him, like the waters
from an urn lost in the wide ocean? Or, was it still within
him, imprisoned by some obstruction that might one day
break asunder?

It might be so; he tried to keep his grasp on that hope.
For, since the day when he had first walked feebly from
his couch of straw, and had felt anew darkness within him
under the sunlight, his mind had undergone changes,
partly gradual and persistent, partly sudden and fleeting.
As he had recovered his strength of body, he had recovered
his self-command and the energy of his will; he had recov-
ered the memory of all that part of his life which was
closely enwrought with his emotions; and he had felt more
and more constantly and painfully the uneasy sense of lost

THE AVEXOER'S SECRET. 255

knowledge. But more than that — once or twice, when he
had been strongly excited, he had seemed momentarily to
be in entire possession of his past self, as old men doze for
an instant and get back the consciousness of their youth.
He seemed again to see Greek pages and understand them,
again to feel his mind moving unbenumbed among familiar
ideas. It had been but a flash, and the darkness closing
in again seemed the more horrible; but might not the same
thing happen again for longer periods? If it would only
come and stay long enough for him to achieve a revenge —
devise an exquisite suffering, such as a mere right arm
could never inflict'

He raised himself from his stooping attitude, and, fold-
ing his arms, attempted to concentrate all his mental force
on the plan he must immediately pursue. He had to wait
for knowledge and opportunity, and while he waited he
must have the means of living without beggary. What he
dreaded of all things now was, that any one should think
him a foolish, helpless old man. No one must know that
half his memory was gone; the lost strength might come
again; and if it were only for a little while, that might be
enough.

He knew how to begin to get the information he wanted
about Tito. He repeated the words ''Bratti Ferravecchi ''
so constantly after they had been uttered to him, that they
never slipped from him for long together. A man at
Genoa, on whose finger he had seen Tito's ring, had told
him that he bought that ring at Florence, of a young
Greek, well dressed, and with a handsome dark face, in the
shop of a rigattiere called Bratti Ferravecchi, in the street
also called Ferravecchi. This discovery had cause a violent
agitation in Baldassarre. Until then he had clung with
all the tenacity of his fervent nature to his faith in Tito,
and had not for a moment believed himself to be wilfully
forsaken. At first he had said, "My bit of j^archment
has never reached him; that is why I am still toiling at
Antioch. But he is searching; he knows where I was lost:
he will trace me out, and find me at last." Then, when
he was taken to Corinth, he induced his owners, by the
assurance that he should be sought out and ransomed, to
provide securely against the failure of any inquiries that
might be made about him at Antioch; and at Corinth he
thought joyfully, ''Here, at last, he must find me. Here
he is sure to touch, whichever way he goes." But before
another year had passed, the illness had come from which

256 ROMOLA.

he had risen with body and mind so sliattered that he was
worse than worthless to his owners, excejit for the sake of
the ransom that did not come. Then, as he sat helpless
in the morning sunlight, he began to think, "Tito has
l)een drowned, or they had made him a prisoner too. I
shall see him no more. He set out after me, but mis-
fortune overtook him. I shall see his face no more."
Sitting in his new feebleness and despair, supporting his
liead between his hands, with blank eyes and lips that
moved uncertainly, he looked so much like a hopelessly
imbecile old man, that his OAvners were contented to be rid
of him, and allowed a Genoese merchant, who had com-
passion on him as an Italian, to take him on board his
galley. In a voyage of many months in the Archi|')elago
and along the seaboard of Asia Minor, Baldassarre had
recovered his bodily strength, but on landing at Genoa
he had so weary a sense of his desolateness that he almost
wished he had died of that illness at Corinth. There was
just one possibility that hindered the wish from being
decided: it was that Tito might not be dead, but living in
a state of imprisonment or destitution; and if he lived,
there was still a hope for Baldassarre — faint, perhaps, and
likely to be long deferred, but still a hope, that he might
find his child, his cherished son again; miglit yet again
clasp hands and meet face to face with the one being who
remembered him as he had been before his mind was broken.

In this state of feeling he had chanced to meet the
stranger who wore Tito's onyx ring, and though Baldassarre
would have been unable to describe the ring beforehand,
the sight of it stirred the dorment fibres, and he recog-
nized it. That Tito nearly a year after his father had
been parted from him should have been living in apparent
prosperity ax Florence, selling the gem which he ought not
to have sold till the last exteemity, was a fact that Bald-
assarre shrank from trying to account for: he was glad to
be stunned and bewildered by it, rather than to have any
distinct thought; he tried to feel nothing but joy tliat lie
should behold Tito again. Perhaps Tito had tliouglit that
his father was dead; somehow the mystery would be
explained. '' But at least I shall meet eyes that will
remember me. I am not alone in the world,''

And now again Baldassarre said, " I am not alone in
the world; I shall never be alone, for my revenge is with
me."

It was as the instrument of that revenge, as something

THE avenger's seceet. 257

merely external and subservient to his true life, that he
bent down again to examine himself Math hard curiosity —
not, he thought, because he had any care for a withered,
forsaken old man, whom nobody loved, whose soul was
like a deserted home, where the ashes were cold upon the
hearth, and the walls were bare of all but the marks of
what had been. It is in the nature of all human passion,
the lowest as well as the highest, that there is a point
where it ceases to be properly egoistic, and is like a fire
kindled within our being to which everything else in us is
mere fuel.

He looked at the pale, black-browed image in the water
till he identified it with that self from which his revenge
seemed to be a thing ajaart; and he felt as if the image,
too, heard the silent language of his thought.

" I was a loving fool — I worshipped a woman once, and
believed she could care for me; and then I took a helpless
child and fostered him; and I watched him as he grew, to
see if he would care for me only a little — care for me over
and above the good he got from me. I would have torn
open my breast to warm him with my life-blood if I could
only have seen him care a little for the pain of my wound.
I have labored, I have strained to crush out of this hard
life one drop of unselfish love. Fool ! men love their own
delights; there is no delight to be had in. me. And yet I
watched till I believed I saw what I watched for. When
he was a child he lifted soft eyes toward me, and held my
hand willingly: I thought, this boy will surely love me a
little: because I give my life to him and strive that he
shall know no sorrow, he will care a little when I am
thirsty — the drop he lays on my parched lips will be a joy
to him. * * * Curses on him! I wish I may see him
lie with those red lips white and dry as ashes, and when he
looks for pity I wish he may see my face rejoicing in his
pain. It is all a lie — this world is a lie — there is no good-
ness but in hate. Fool ! not one drop of love came with
all your striving: life has not given you one drop. But
there are deep draughts in this world for hatred and
revenge. I have memory left for that, and there is strength
in my arm — there is strength in my will — and if I can do
nothing but kill him "

But Baldassarre's mind rejected the thought of that

brief punishment. His whole soul had been thrilled into

immediate unreasoning belief in that eternity of vengeance

where he, an undviug h.:ito. miaht clutch forever an

'^bb BOMOLA.

undying traitor, and hear that fair smiling hardness cry
and moan with anguish. But the primary need and hope
was to see a slow revenge under the same sky and on the
same earth where he himself had been forsaken and had
fainted with despair. And as soon as he tried to concen-
trate his mind on the means of attaining his end, the
sense of his weakness pressed upon him like a frosty ache.
Tliis despised body, which was to be the instrument of a
sublime vengeance, must be nourished and decently clad.
If he had to wait he must labor, and his labor must
be of a humble sort, for he had no skill. He wondered
whether the sight of written characters would so stimulate
his faculties that he might venture to try and find work
as a copyist; that might win him some credence for his
past scholarship. But no! he dared trust neither hand nor
brain. He must be content to do the work that was most
like that of a beast of burden: in this mercantile city
many porters must be wanted, and he could at least carry
weights. Thanks to the justice that struggled in this
confused world in behalf of vengeance, his limbs had got
back some of their old sturdiness. He was stripj^ed of all
else that men could give coin for.

But the new lu'gency of this habitual thought brought
a new suggestson. There was something hanging by a
cord round his bare neck; something apj)arently so paltry
that the piety of Turks and Frenchmen had spared it — a
tiny parchment bag blackened with age. It had hung
round his neck as a precious charm when he was a boy,
and he had kei')t it carefully on his breast, not believing
that it contained anything but a tiny scroll of parchment
rolled up hard. He might long ago have thrown it away as a
relic of his dead mother's superstition; but he had thought
of it as a relic of her love, and had kept it. It was part
of the piety associated with such brevi, that they should
never be opened, and at any precious moment in his life
Baldassarre would have said that no sort of thirst would
prevail upon him to open this little bag for the chance of
finding that it contained, not parchment, but an engraved
amulet which would bo worth money. But now a thirst
had come like that which makes men open their own veins
to satisfy it, and the thought of the possible amulet no
sooner crossed Baldassarre's mind than with nervous fingers
he snatched the breve from his neck. It all rushed through
his mind — the long years he had worn it, the far-off sunny
balcony at Naples looking toward tiie blue waters, where

THE avenger's SECRET. 259

he had leaned against his mother's knee; but it made no
moment of hesitation: all piety now was transmuted into a
just revenge. He bit and tore till the doubles of parchment
were laid open, and then — it was a sight that made him pant
— there was an amulet. It was very small, but it was as blue
as those far-off waters; it was an engraved sapphire, which
must be worth some gold ducats. Baldassarre no sooner
saw those possible ducats than he saw some of them ex-
changed for a ])oniard. He did not want to use the
poniard yet, but he longed to possess it. If he could
grasp its handle and try its edge, that blank in his mind —
that past which fell away continually — would not make
him feel so cruelly helpless: the sharp steel that despised
talents and eluded strength would be at his side, as the
unfailing friend of feeble justice. There was a sparkling
triumph under Baldassarre's black eyebrows as he replaced
the little sapphire inside the bits of parchment and wound
the string tightly round them.

It was nearly dusk now, and he rose to walk back toward
Florence. With his danari to buy him some bread, he
felt rich: he could lie out in the open air, as he found
plenty more doing in all corners of Florence. And in
the next few days he had sold his sapphire, had added to
his clothing, had bought a bright dagger, and had still a
pair of gold florins left. But he meant to hoard that
treasure carefully: his lodging was an outhouse with a
heap of straw in it, in a thinly-inhabited part of Oltrarno,
and he thought of looking about for work as a porter.

He had bought his dagger at Bratti's. Paying his
meditated visit there one evening at dusk, he had found
that singular rag-merchant just returned from one of his
rounds, emptying out his basketful of broken glass and
old iron amongst his handsome show of miscellaneous
second-hand goods. As Baldassarre entered the shop, and
looked toward the smart pieces of apparel, the musical
instruments, and weapons, which were displayed in the
broadest light of the window, his eye at once singled out
a dagger hanging up high against a red scarf. By buying
the dagger he could not only satisfy a strong desire, he
could open his original errand in a more indirect' manner
than by speaking of the onyx ring. In the course of
bargaining for the weapon, he let drop, with cautious
carelessness, that he came from Genoa, and had been
directed to Bratti's shop by an acquaintance in that city

260 EOMOLA.

who had bought a A^ery valuable ring here. Had the
respectable trader any more such rings?

Whereupon Bratti had much to say as to the unlikeli-
hood of such rings being within reach of many people,
with much vaunting of his own rare connections, due to
his known wisdom and honesty. It might be true that he
was a peddler — he chose to be a peddler; though he was
rich enough to kick his heels in his shop all day. But
those who thought they had said all there was to be said
about Bratti when they had called him a peddler, were a
good deal further off the truth than the other side of
Pisa. How was it that he could put that ring in a
stranger's way? It was, because he had a very particular
knowledge of a handsome young signor, who did not look
quite so fine a feathered bird when Bratti first set eyes on
him as he did at the present time. And by a question or
two Baldassarre extracted, without any trouble, such a
rough and rambling account of Tito's life as the peddler
could give, since the time when he had found him sleep-
ing under the Loggia de Cerchi. It never occurred to
Bratti that the decent man ( who was rather deaf, appar-
ently, asking him to say many things twice over ) had any
curiosity about Tito; the curiosity was doubtless about
himself, as a truly remarkable peddler.

And Baldassarre left Bratti's shop, not only with the
dagger at his side, but also with a general knowledge of
Tito's conduct and position — of his early sale of the
jewels, his immediate quiet settlement of himself at Flor-
ence, his marriage, and his great prosperity.

"What story had he told about his previous life — about
his father?"

It would be difficult for Baldassarre to discover the answer
to that question. Meanwhile, he wanted to learn all he
could about Florence. But he found, to his acute distress,
that of the new details he learned he could only retain a
few, and those only by continual repetition; and he began to
be afraid of listening to any new discourse, lest it should
obliterate what he was already striving to remember.

The day he was discerned by Tito in the Piazza del
Duomo he had the fresh anguish of this consciousness in
his mind, and Tito's ready speech fell upon him like the
mockery of a glib, defying demon.

As he went home to his heap of straw, and passed by
the booksellers' shops in the Via del Garbo; he paused to
look at the volumes spread open. Could he by long

FRUIT IS SEED. 261

gazing at one of those books lay hold of the slippery-
threads of memory? Conld he, by striving, get a firm
grasp somewhere, and lift himself above these waters that
flowed over him?

He was tempted, and bought the cheapest Greek book
he conld see. He carried it home and sat on his heap of
straw, looking at the characters by the light of the small
window; but no inward light arose on them. Soon the
evening darkness cume ; but it made little difference to
Baldassarre. His strained eyes seemed still to see the
white pages with the unintelligible black marks upon
them.

CHAPTEE XXXI.

FRUIT IS SEED.

"My Romola," said Tito, the second morning after he
had made his speech in the Piazza del Duomo, "I am to
receive grand visitors to-day; the Milanese Count is coming
again, and the Seneschal de Beaucaire, the great favorite
of the Cristianissimo. I know you don't care to go through
smiling ceremonies with these rustling magnates, whom
we are not likely to see again; and as they will want to
look at the antiquities and the library, perhaps you had
better give up your work to-day, and go to see your cousin
Brigida.**

Romola discerned a wish in this intimation, and immedi-
ately assented. But presently, coming back in her hood
and mantle, she said, " Oh, what a long breath Florence
will take whe-u the gates are flung upen, and the last
Frenchman is walking out of them I Even you are getting
tired, with all your patience, my Tito; confess it. Ah,
your head is hot."

He was leaning over his desk, writing, and she had laid
her hand on his head, meaning to give a parting caress.
The attitude had been a frequent one, and Tito was accus-
tomed, when he felt her hand there, to raise his head,
throw himself a little backward, and look up at her. But
he felt now as unable to raise his head as if her hand had
been a leaden cowl. He spoke instead, in a light tone, as
his pen still ran along.

262 KOMOLA.

"The French are as ready to go from Florence as the
wasps to leave a ripe pear when they have Just fastened
on it."

Eomola, keenly sensitive to the absence of the usual
response, took away her hand and said, "I am going,

"Farewell, my sweet one. I must wait at home. Take
Maso with you."

Still Tito did not look up, and Romola went out without
saying any more. Very slight things make epochs in
married life, and this morning for the first time she
admitted to herself not only that Tito had changed, but
that he had changed toward her. Did the reason lie in
herself ? She might perhaps have thought so, if there had
not been the facts of tlie armor and the picture to suggest
some external event which was an entire mystery to her.

But Tito no sooner believed that Romola was out of the
house than he laid down his pen and looked up, in delight-
ful security from seeing anything else tlum parcliment and
broken marble. He was rather disgusted with himself that
he had not been able to look uj) sit Eomola and behave to her
just as usual. He would have chosen, if he could, to be
even more than usually kind; but he could not, on a sud-
den, master an involuntary shrinking from her, which by a
subtle relation, depended on those very characteristics in
him that made him desire not to fail in his marks of affec-
tion. He was about to take a step which he knew would
arouse her deep indignation; he would have to encounter
much that was unpleasant before he could win her forgive-
ness. And Tito could never find it easy to face displeasure
and anger; his nature was one of those most remote from
defiance or impudence, and all his inclinations leaned
toward preserving Romola's tenderness. He was not tor-
mented by sentimental scruples which, as he had demon-
strated to himself by a very rapid course of argument, had
no relation to solid utility; but his freedom from scruples
did not release him from the dread of what was disagree-
able. Unscrupulousness gets rid of much, but not of
toothache, or wounded vanity, or the sense of loneliness,
against which, as the world at present stands, there is no
Security but a thoroughly healthy jaw, and a just, loving
soul. And Tito was feeling intensely at this moment that
no devices could save him from ])ain in the imnending col-
lision with Romola; no ])ersuasive blanduess could cushion
him against the shock toward which he was being driven

FRUIT IS SEED. 26^

like a timid animal urged to a desperate leap by the terror
of the tooth and the claws that are close behind it.

The secret feeling that he had previously had that the
tenacious adherence to Bardo's wishes about the library
had become under existing difficulties a piece of senti-
mental folly, which deprived himself and Eomola of sub-
stantial advantages, might perhaps never have wrought
itself into action but for the events of the past week, which
had brought at once the pressure of a new motive and the
outlet of a rare opportunity. Nay, it was not till his dread
had been aggravated by the sight of Baldassarre looking
more like his sane self, not until he had begun to feel that
he might be compelled to flee from Florence, that he had
brought himself to resolve on his legal right to sell the
library before the great opportunity offered by French and
Milanese bidders slipped through his fingers. For if h&
had to leave Florence he did not want to leave it as a
destitute wanderer. He had been used to an agi-eeable ex-
istence, and he wished to carry with him all the means at
hand for retaining the same agreeable conditions. He
wished among other things to carry Romola with him, and
710 f, if possible, to carry any infamy. Success had given
him a growing appetite for all the pleasures that depend
on an advantageous social position, and at no moment
could it look like a temptation to him, but only like a
hideous alternative, to decamp under dishonor, even with
a bag of diamonds, and incur the life of an adventurer.
It was not possible for him to make himself indej^endent
even of those Florentines who only greeted him with regard;
still less was it possible for him to make himself inde-
pendent of Romola. She was the wife of his first love — he
loved her still; she belonged to that furniture of life which
he shrank from parting with. He winced uuder her judg-
ment, he felt uncertain how far the revulsion of her feeling
toward him might go; and all that sense of power over a wife
which makes a husband risk betrayals that a lover never
ventures on, would not suffice to counteract Tito's uneasi-
ness. This was the leaden weight which had been too
strong for his will, and kept him from raising his head to
meet her eyes. Their pure light brought too near him the
prospect of a coming struggle. But it was not to be
helped; if they had to leave Florence, they must have
money; indeed, Tito could not arrange life at all to his
mind without a considerable sum of money. And that
problem of arranging life to his mind had been the source

264 ROMOLA.

of all his misdoing. He would have been equal to any
sacrifice that was not unpleasant.

The rustling magnets came and went, the bargains had
been concluded, and Eomola returned home; but nothing
grave was said that night. Tito was only gay and chatty,
pouring forth to her, as he had not done before, stories
and descriptions of what he had witnessed during the
French visit. Eomola thought she discerned an effort in
his liveliness, and attributing it to the consciousness in him
that she had been wounded in the morning, accepted the
effort as an act of penitence, inwardly aching a little at
that sign of growing distance between them — that there
was an offence about which neither of them dared to speak.

The next day Tito remained away from home until late
at night. It was a marked day to Romola, for Piero di
Cosimo, stimulated to greater industry on her behalf by
the fear that he might have been the cause of pain to her
in the past week, had sent home her father's portrait. Siie
had propped it against the back of his old chair, and had
been looking at it for some time, when the door opened
behind her, and Bernardo del Nero came in.

''It is you, godfather! How I wished you had come
sooner! it is getting a little dusk," said Romola, going
toward him.

" I have just looked in to tell you the good news, for I
know Tito has not come yet," said Bernardo. "The
French king moves off to-morrow: not before it is high
time. There has been another tussle between our people
and his soldiers this morning. But there's a chance now
of the city getting into order once more and trade going
on."

"That is joyful," said Romola. "But it is sudden, is
it not? Tito seemed to think yesterday that there was
little prospect of the king's going soon."

"He has been well barked* at, that's the reason," said
Bernardo, smiling. " His own generals opened their
throats pretty well, and at last our Signoria sent the mas-
tiff of the city, Fra Girolamo. The Cristianissimo was
frightened at that thunder, and has given the order to
move. I'm afraid there'll be small agreement among us
Avhen he's gone, but, at any rate, all parties are agreed in
being glad not to have Florence stifled with soldiery any
longer, and the Frate has barked this time to some pur-
pose. Ah, what is this?" he added, as Romola, clasping

FRUIT IS SEED. 265

him by the arm, led him in front of the picture. " Let us

see."

He began to unwind his long scarf while she placed a
seat for him.

"Don't you want your spectacles, godfather?" said
Eomola, in anxiety that he should see just what she saw.

"No, child, no," said Bernardo, uncovering his gray
head, as he seated himself with firm erectness. " For see-
ing at this distance, my old eyes are perhaps better than
your young ones. Old men's eyes are like old men's mem-
ories, they are strongest for things a long way off."

"It is better than having no portrait," said Komola,
apologetically, after Bernardo had been silent a little
while. "It is less like him now than the image I have in
my mind, but then that might fade with the years." She
rested her arm on the old man's shoulder as she spoke,
drawn toward him strongly by their common interest in
the dead. *

"I don't know," said Bernardo. " I almost think I see
Bardo as he was when he was young, better than that pic-
ture shows him to me as he was when he was old. Your
father had a great deal of fire in his eyes when he was
young. It was what I could never understand, that he,
with his fiery spirit, which seemed much more impatient
than mine, could liang over the books and live with shad-
ows all his life. However, he had put his heart into that."

Bernardo gave a slight shrug as he spoke the last words,
but Eomola discerned in his voice a feeling that accorded
with her own.

"And he was disappointed to the last," she said, invol-
untarily. But immediately fearing lest her words should
be taken to imply an accusation against Tito, she went on
almost hurriedly, "If we could only see his longest,
dearest wish fulfilled just to his mind!"

"Well, so we may," said Bernardo, kindly, rising and
putting on his cap. "The times are cloudy now, but fish
are caught by waiting. Who knows? When the wheel
has turned often enough, I may be Gonfaloniere yet before
I die; and no creditor can touch these things." He
looked round as he spoke. Then, turning to her, and
patting her cheek, said, "And you need not be afraid of
my dying; my ghost will claim nothing. I've taken care
of that in my will."

Eomola seized the liand that was against her cheek, and
put it to her lips in silence.

266 KOMOLA.

"Haven't you been scolding your husband for keeping
away from home so much lately? I see him everywhere
but here," said Bernardo, willing to change the subject.

She felt the flush spread over her neck and face as she
said, "He has been very much wanted; you know he
speaks so well. I am glad to know that his value is
understood."

"You are contented, then, Madonna Orgogliosa?" said
Bernardo, smiling, as he moved to the door.

"Assuredly."

Poor Romola! There was one thing that would have
made the pang of disappointment in her husband harder
to bear; it was, that any one should know he gave her
cause for disappointment. This might be a woman's
weakness, but it is closely allied to a woman's nobleness.
She who willingly lifts up the veil of her married life has
profaned it from a sanctuary into a vulgar place.

CHAPTER XXXII.

A REVELATION.

The next day Romola, like every other Florentine, was
excited about the departure of the French. Besides her
other reasons for gladness, she had a dim hope, which she
was conscious was half superstitious, that those new anxi-
eties about Tito, having come with the burdensome guests,
might perhaps vanish with them. The French had been
in Florence hardly eleven days, but in that space she had
felt more acute unhai)])iness than she had known in her
life before. Tito had adopted the hateful armor on the
day of their arrival, and though she could frame no dis-
tinct notion why their departure should remove the cause
of his fear — though, when she thought of that cause, the
image of the prisoner grasping him, as she had seen it in
Piero's sketch, urged itself before her and excluded every
other — still, when the French were gone, she would be rid
of somethmg that was strongly associated with her pain.

Wrapped in her mantle she waited under the loggia at
the top of the house, and watched for the glimpses of the
troops and royal retinue passing the bridges on tlieir way
to the Porta San Piero, that looks toward Siena and Rome.

A REVELATIOiC. 267

She even returned to her station when the gates had been
closed, that she might feel herself vibrating with the great
peal of the bells. It was dusk then, and when at last she
descended into the library, she lit her lamp with the reso-
lution that she would overcome the agitation which had
made her idle all day, and sit down to work at her copying
of the catalogue, Tito had left home early in the morn-
ing, and she did not expect him yet. Before he came she
intended to leave the library and sit in the pretty saloon,
with the dancing nymphs and the birds. She had done so
every evening since he had objected to the library as chill
and gloomy.

To her great surprise, she had not been at work long-
before Tito entered. Her first thought was, how cheerless
he w^ould feel in the wide darkness of this great room, with
one little oil-lamp burning at the further end, and the fire
nearly out. She almost ran toward him.

''Tito, dearest, I did not know you would come so soon,"
she said, nervously, putting up her white arms to unwind
his becchetto.

"'1 am not welcome then?" he said, with one of his
brightest smiles, clasping her, but playfully holding his
head back from her.

*'TitoI" She uttered the word in a tone of pretty,
loving reproach, and then he kissed her fondly, stroked
her hair, as his manner w^as, and seemed not to mind
about taking off his mantle yet. Romola quivered with
delight. All the emotions of the day had been jDreparing
in her a keener sensitiveness to the return of this habitual
manner. ''It will come back,^' she was saying to herself,
" the old happiness will perhaps come back. He is like
himself again.'-'

Tito was taking great pains to be like himself; his heart
was palpitating with anxiety.

" If I had expected you so soon," said Eomola, as she at
last heljDed him to take off his wrappings, " I would have
had a little festival prepared to this joyful ringing of the
bells. I did not mean to be here in the library when you
came home."

"Never mind, sweet," he said carelessly. "Do not
think about the fire. Come — come and sit down."

There was a low stool against Tito^s chair, and that was
Romola's habitual seat wlien they were talking together.
She rested her arm on his knee, as she used to do on her
father^s, and looked up at him while he spoke. He had

368 ROMOLA.

never yet noticed the presence of the portrait, and she had
not mentioned it — thinking of it all the more.

"I have been enjoying the clang of the bells for the first
time, Tito," she began. " I liked being shaken and deaf-
ened by them: I fancied I was something like a Bacchante
possessed by a divine rage. Are not the peojale looking
very joyful to-night?"

"Joyful after a sour and pious fashion," said Tito, with
a shrug. " But, in truth, those who are left behind in
Florence have little cause to be joyful: it. seems to me. the
most reasonable ground of gladness would be to have got
out of Florence."

Tito had sounded the desired keynote without any
trouble, or appearance of premeditation. He spoke with
no emphasis, but he looked grave enough to make Eomola
ask rather anxiously —

" Why, Tito? Are there fresh troubles?"

''No need of fresh ones, my Eomola. There are three
strong parties in the city, all ready to fly at each other's
throats. And if the Frate's party is strong enough to
frighten the other two into silence, as seems most likeW,
life will be as pleasant and amusing as a funeral. They
have the plan of a Great Council simmering already; and
if they get it, the man who sings sacred Lauds the loudest
will be the most eligible for office. And besides that, the
city will be so drained by the payment of this great subsidy
to the French king, and by the war to get back Pisa, that
the prospect would be dismal enough Avithout the rule of
fanatics. On the whole, Florence will be a delightful
place for those worthies who entertain themselves in the
evening by going into crypts and lashing themselves; but
for everything else, the exiles have the best of it. For my
own part, I have been thinking seriously that we should be
wise to quit Florence, my Eomola."

She started. "Tito, how could we leave Florence?
Surely you do not think I could leave it — at least, not
yet — not for a long while." She had turned cold and
trembling, and did not find it quite easy to speak. Tito
must know the reasons she had in her mind.

" That is all a fabric of your own imagination, my sweet
one. Your secluded life has made you lay such false stress
on a few things. You know I used to tell you, before we
were married, that I wished we were somewhere else than
in Florence. If you had seen more places and more people,
you would know what I mean when I say tlierc is some-

A REVELATIOI^. 239

thing in the Florentines that reminds me of their cutting
spring winds. I like people who take life less eagerly;
and it would he good for my Romola, too, to see a new
life. I should like to dip her a little in the soft waters of
forgetfulness."

He leaned forward and kissed her brow, and laid his
hand on her fair hair again; but she felt his caress no more
than if he had kissed a mask. She was too much agitated
by the sense of the distance between their minds to he con-
scious that his lips touched her.

"Tito, it is not because I suppose Florence is the pleas-
antest place in the world that I desire not to quit it. It is
because I — because we have to see my father's wish ful-
filled. My godfather is old; he is seventy-one; we could
not leave it to him."

''It is precisely those superstitions which hang about
your mind like bedimming clouds, my Romola, that make
one great reason why I could wish we were two hundred
leagues from Florence. I am obliged to take care of you
in opposition to your own will: if those dear eyes, that look
so tender, see falselv, I must see for them, and save my
wife from wasting her life in disappointing herself by
impracticable dreams."

Romola sat silent and motionless: she could not blind
herself to the direction in which Tito's words pointed: he
wanted to persuade her that they might get the library
deposited in some monastery, or take some other means to
rid themselves of a task, and of a tie to Florence; and she
was determined never to submit her mind to his judgment
on this question of duty to her father; she was inwardly
prepared to encounter any sort of pain in resistance. But
the determination was kept latent in these first moments
hy the heart-crushing sense that now at last she and Tito
must be confessedly divided in their wishes. He was glad
of her silence; for, much as he had feared the strength of
her feeling, it was impossible for him, shut up in the nar-
rowness that hedges in all merely clever, unimpassioned
men, not to overestimate the persuasiveness of his own
jivguments. His conduct did not look ugly to himself,
and his imagination did not suflBce to show him exactly
how it would look to Romola. He went on in the same
gentle, remonstrating tone.

"You know, dearest— your own clear judgment always
showed you— that the notion of isolating a collection of
books and antiquities, and attaching a single- name to

370 ROMOLA.

them forever, was one that had no valid, substantial good
for its object: and yet more, one that was liable to be
defeated in a thousand ways. See what has become of
the Medici collections! And, for my part, I consider it
even Ijlame-worthy to entertain those petty views of appro-
priation: why should any one be reasonably glad that
Florence should possess the benefits of learned research and
taste more than any other city? I understand your feeling
about the wishes of the dead; but wisdom puts a limit to
these sentiments, else lives might be continually wasted in
that sort of futile devotion — like praising deaf gods forever.
You gave your life to your father while he lived; why
should you demand more of yourself?"

" Because it was a trust,*' said Romola in a low but
distinct voice. " He trusted me, he trusted you, Tito, I
did not expect you to feel anything else about it — to feel
as I do — but I did expect you to feel that."

'^ Yes, dearest, of course I should feel it on a point
where your father's real welfare or happiness was con-
cerned; but there is no question of that now. If we believe
in purgatory, I should be as anxious as you to have masses
said; and if I believed it could now pain your father to see
his library preserved and used in a rather different way
from what he had set his mind on, I should share the
strictness of your views. But a little philosophy should
teach us to rid ourselves of those air-woven fetters that
mortals hang round themselves, spending their lives in
misery under the mere imagination of weight. Your
mind, wliicli seizes ideas so readily, my Romola, is able to
discriminate between substantial good and these brain-
wrought fantasies. Ask yourself, dearest, what possible
good can these books and antiquities do, stowed together
under your father's name in Florence, more than they
would do if they were divided or carried elsewhere? Nay,
is not the very dispersion of such things in hands that
know how to value them, one means of extending their
usefulness? This rivalry of Italian cities is very petty and
illiberal. The loss of Constantinople was the gain of the
whole civilized world."

Romola was still too thoroughly under the painful pres-
sure of the new revelation Tito was making of himself, for
her resistance to find any strong vent. As that fluent talk
fell on her ears there was a rising contempt within her,
which only made her more conscious of her bruised, des-
pairing love, her love for the Tito she had married and

A REYELATIOX. ^'^1

believed iu. Her nature, possessed with the energies of
strong emotion, recoiled from this hopelessly shallow read-
iness which professed to appropriate the widest sympathies
and had no pnlse for the nearest. She still spoke hke one
Avho was restrained from showing all she felt. She had
only- drawn away her arm from his knee, and sat with her
hands clasped before her, cold and motionless as locked

waters. » • i <• i

"Yon talk of substantial good, Tito! Are faithfulness,
and- love, and sweet grateful memories, no good? Is it no
good that we should keep our silent promises on which
others build because they believe in our love and truth?
Is it no good that a just life should be justly honored?
Or, is it good that we should harden onr hearts against all
the wants and hopes of those who have depended on us?
What good can belong to men who have such souls? To
talk cleverly, perhaps, and find soft couches for themselves,
and live and die with their base selves as their best com-
panions." .

Her voice had gradually risen till there was a ring ot
scorn in the last words; she made a slight pause, but he
saw there were other words quivering on her lips, and he
chose to let them come.

" I know of no good for cities or the world if they are
to be made up of such beings. But I am not thinking of
other Italian cities and the whole civilized world — I am
thinking of my father, and of my love and sorrow for
him, and of his" just claims on us. I would give up any-
thing else, Tito,— I would leave Florence,— what else did
I live for but for him and you? But I will not give up
that duty. What have I to do with your arguments? It
Avas a yearning of Ms heart, and therefore it is a yearning

of mine." . , n n

Her voice, from having been tremulous, had become
full and firm. She felt that she had been urged on to say
all that it was needful for her to say. She thought, poor
thing, there was nothing harder to come than this struggle
against Tito's suggestions as against the meaner part of

herself. n , ^

He had begun to see clearly that he could not persuade
her into assent: he must take another course, and show
her that the time for resistance was past. That, at least,
would put an end to further struggle ; and if the dis-
closure were not made bv himself to-night, to-morrow it
must be made in another" way. This necessity nerved his

272 ROMOLA.

courage; and his experience of her affectionateness and
unexpected submissiveness, ever since their marriage until
now, encouraged him to liope that, at last, she would
accommodate herself to what had been his will.

"1 am sorry to hear you speak in that spirit of blind
persistence, my Romola," he said quietly, "because it
obliges me to give you pain. But I partly foresaw your
opposition, and as a prompt decision was necessary, I
avoided that obstacle, and decided without consulting you.
The very care of a husband for his wife's interest compels
him to that sepai-ate action sometimes — even when he has
such a wife as you, my llomola."

She turned her eyes on him in breathless inquiry.

"I mean," he said, answering her look, "that I have
arranged for the transfer, both of the books and of the
antiquities, where they will find the highest use and value.
The books have been bought for the Duke of Milan, the
marbles and bronzes and the rest are going to France: and
both will be protected by the stability of a great Power,
instead of remaining in a city which is exposed to ruin."

Before he had finished speaking Romola had started
from her seat and stood up looking down at him, with tight-
ened hands falling before her, and, for the first time in
her life, Avith a flash of fierceness in her scorn and anger.

"You have sold them?" she asked, as if she distrusted
her ears.

"I have," said Tito, quailing a little. The scene was
unpleasant — the descending scorn already scorched him,

"You are a treacherous man!" she said, with something
grating in her voice, as she looked down at him.

She was silent for a minute, and he sat still, feeling that
ingenuity was powerless Just now. Suddenly she turned
away, and said, in an agitated tone, " It may be hindered —
I am going to my godfather."

In an instant Tito started up, went to the door, locked
it, and took out the key. It Avas time for all the mascu-
line predominance that was latent in him to show itself.
But he was not angry; he only felt that the moment was
eminently unpleasant, and that when this scene was at an
end he should be glad to keep away from Romola for a
little Avhile. But it was absolutely necessary first that she
should be reduced to passiveness.

" Try to calm yourself a little, Romola," he said, leaning
in the easiest attitude possible against a pedestal under the
bust of a grim old Roman. Not that he was inwardly

A REVELATION. 273

easy: his heart palpitated with a moral dread, against
which no chain armor could be found. He had locked
in his wife's anger and scorn, but he had been obliged to
lock himself in with it; and his blood did not rise with
contest— his olive cheek was perceptibly paled.

Komola had paused and turned her eyes on him as she
saw him take his stand and lodge the key in his scarsella.
Her eyes were flashing, and her whole frame seemed to be
possessed by impetuous force that wanted to leap out in
some deed. All the crushing pain of disappointment m
her husband, which had made the strongest part of her
consciousness a few minutes before, was annihilated by the
vehemence of her indignation. She could not care m this
moment that the man she was despising as he leaned there
in his loathsome beauty— she could not care that he was
her husband; she could only feel that she despised him.
The pride and fierceness of the old Bardo blood had been
thoroughly awaked in her for the first time.

"Try at least to understand the fact," said Tito, 'and
do not seek to take futile steps which may be fatal. It is
of no use for you to go to your godfather. Messer Ber-
nardo cannot reverse what I have done. Only sit down.
You would hardly wish, if you were quite yourself, to
make known to any third person what passes between us

in private." ■ -, n-, ,i

Tito knew that he had touched the right fibre there.
But she did not sit down; she was too unconscious of her
body voluntarily to change her attitude.

" Why can it not be reversed?" she said, after a pause.
"Nothing is moved yet."

" Simply because the sale has been concluded by written
agreement; the purchasers have left Florence, and I hold
the bonds for the purchase-money."

"If my father had suspected you of being a faithless
man," said Romola, in a tone of bitter scorn, which in-
sisted on darting out before she could say anything else,
"he would have placed the library safely out of your
power. But death overtook him too soon, and when you
were sure his ear was deaf, and his hand stiff, you robbed
him." She paused an instant, and then said, with gathered
passion, "Have vou robbed somebody else, who is not
dead? Is that the reason you wear armor? "

Romola had been driven to utter the words as men are
driven to use the lash of the horsewhip. At first, Tito
felt horribly cowed; it seemed to him that the disgrace he
18

"'i'^-i: liOMOLA.

had beeu dreading would be worse than he had imagined
it. But soon there was a reaction: such power of dislike
and resistance as there was within him was beginning to
rise against a wife whose voice seemed like the herald of a
retributive fate. Her, at least, his quick mind told him
that he might master.

"It is useless/' he said coolly, ''to answer the words of
madness, Eomola. Your jjeculiar feeling about your fatlier
has made you mad at this moment. Any rational person
looking at the case from a due distance will see that I have
taken the wisest course. Apart from the influence of vour
exaggerated feelings on him, I am convinced that Messer
Bernardo would be of that opinion."

" He would not! " said Romola. " He lives in the hope
of seeing my father's wish exactly fulfilled. We spoke of
it togetlier only yesterda}'. He will help me yet. Who
are these men to whom you have sold my father's property ? "
"There is no reason why you should not be told, except
that it signifies little. The Count di San Seversno and
the Seneschal de Beaucaire are now on their way with the
king to Siena."

" They maybe overtaken and persuaded to give up their
purchase," said Romola, eagerly, her anger beginning to
be surmounted by anxious thought.

" No, they may not," said Tito, with cool decision.
"Why?"

" Because I do not choose that they should."
"But if you were paid the money? — we will pay you
the money," said Eomola.

No words could have disclosed more fully her sense of
alienation from Tito; but they Avere spoken with less of
bitterness than of anxious pleading. And he felt stronger,
for he saw that the first impulse of fury was past.

"No, my Romola. Understand that such thoughts as
these are impracticable. You would not, in a reasonable
moment, ask your godfather to bury three thousand florins
in addition to what he has already "paid on the library. I
think your pride and delicacy would shrink from that."

She began to tremble and turn cold again with discour-
agement, and sank down on the carved chest near which
she was standing. He went on in a clear voice, under
which she shuddered, as if it had been a narrow cold
stream coursing over a hot cheek,

" Moreover, it is not my will that Messer Berujirdo
should advance the money, even if the project were not an

jl revelation. 275

utterly wild one. And I beg you to consider, before you
take any step or utter any word on the subject, what will
be the consequences of your placing yourself in opposition
to me, and trying to exhibit your husband in the odious
light which your own distemptered feelings cast over him.
AVhat object" will you serve by injuring me with Messer
Bernardo? The event is irrevocable, the library is sold,
and you are my wife."

Everv word was spoken for the sake of a calculated
effect, for his intellect was urged into the utmost activity
by the danger of the crisis. He knew that Eomola's mind
would take in rapidly enough all the wide meaning of his
speech. He waited and watched her in silence.

She had turned her eyes from him, and was looking on
the ground, and in that way she sat for several minutes.
When she spoke, her voice was quite altered, — it was quiet
and cold.

"I have one thing to ask.''

''Ask anvthing that I can do Avithout injuring us both,
Romola."

"■ That you will give me that portion of the money which
belongs to" my godfather, and let me pay him."

'■'I must have some assurance from you first, of the atti-
tude you intend to take toward me."

"Do you believe in assurances, Tito?" she said, with a
tinge of returning bitterness.

"From vou, I do."

"I will" do you no harm. I shall disclose nothing.
I will say nothing to pain him or 5'ou. You say truly,
the event is irrevocable."

"Then I will do what vou desire to-morrow morning."

"To-night, if possible," said Romola, "that we may not
speak of it again."

"It is possible," he said, moving toward the lamp,
while she sat still, looking away from him with absent
eyes.

Presently he came and bent down over her, to put a
piece of paper into her hand. "You will receive some-
thing in return, you are aware, my Romola?" he said,
gently, not minding so much what had passed, now he was
secure; and feeling able to try and propitiate her.

"Yes." she said, taking the paper, without looking at
him, "I understand."

"And you will forsfivo me. mv Romola, when you have
had tmie "to reflect." "He just touched her brow with his

^76 ROMOLA.

lips, but she took no notice, and seemed really unconscious
of the act.

She was aware that he unlocked the door and went out.
She moved her head and listened. The great door of the
court opened and shut again. She started up as if some
sudden freedom had come, and going to her father's chair
where his picture was propped, fell on her knees before it.
and burst into sobs.

CHAPTEE XXXIII.

A.LDASSAERE MAKES AN ACQUAINTANCE.

When Baldassarre was wandering about Florence in
search of a spare outhouse where lie might have the cheap-
est of sheltered beds, his steps had been attracted toward
that sole portion of ground within the walls of the city
which is not perfectly level, and where the sj)ectator, lifted
above the roofs of the houses, can see beyond the city to
the protecting hills and far stretching valley, otherwise
shut out from his view except along the welcome opening
made by the course of the Arno. Part of that ground
has been already seen by us as the hill of Bogoli, at that
time a great stone-quarry; but the side toward which Bal-
dassarre directed his steps was the one that sloped down
behind the Via de Bardi, and was most commonly called
the hill of San Giorgio. Bratti had told him that Tito's
dwelling was in the Via de Bardi; and, after surveying
that street, he turned up the slope of the hill which he
had observed as he was crossing the bridge. If he could
find a sheltering outhouse on that hill, ho would be glad:
he had now for some years been accustomed to live with a
broad sky about him; and, moreover, the narrow jmsses of
the streets, with their strip of sky above, and the unknown
labyrinth around them, seemed to intensify his sense of
loneliness and feeble memory.

The hill was sparsely inhabited, and covered chiefly by
gardens; but in one spot was a piece of rough ground
jagged with great stones, which had never been cultivated
since a landslip had ruined some houses there toward the
end of the thirteenth century. Just above the edge of
this broken ground stood a queer little square building,

A LEARNED SQUIBBLH. 277

gnat, like Venus, was born from tlie waters. Scala, in
reply, begged to say that his verses were never intended
for a scholar with such delicate olfactories as Politian,
nearest of all living men to the perfection of tlic ancients,
and of a taste so fastidious that sturgeon itself must seem
insipid to him; defended his own verses, nevertheless,
though indeed they were written hastily, Avithout cor-
rection, and intended as an agreeable distraction during
the summer heat to himself and such friends as were
satisfied with mediocrity, he, Scala, not being like some
other people, who courted publicity through the book-
sellers. For the rest, he had barely enough Greek to make
out the sense of the epigram so graciously sent him, to say
nothing of tasting its elegances; but — the epigram was
Politian's: what more need be said? Still, by way of post-
script, he feared that his incomparable friend's comparison
of the gnat to Venus, on account of its origin from the
Avaters, was in many ways ticklish. On the one hand,
A^enus might be offended; and on the otlier, unless the
poet intended an allusion to the doctrine of Thales, that
cold and damp origin seemed doubtful to Scala in the case
of a creature so fond of Avarmth; a fish Avere perhaps the
better comparison, or, when the power of flying Avas in
question, an eagle, or indeed, when the darkness was taken
into consideration, a bat or an oavI were a less obscure and
more apposite parallel, etc., etc. Here AA'as a great oppor-
tunity for Politian. He Avas not aAvare, he wrote, that
Avhen he had Scala^s verses placed before him, there Avas
any question of sturgeon, but rather of frogs and gudgeons:
made short work with Scala's defense of his own Latin,
and mangled him terribly on the score of the stupid
criticisms he had A'entured on the Greek epigram kindly
forwarded to him as a model. M retched cavils, indeed!
for as to the damp origin of the gnat, there was the
authority of Virgil himself, Avho had called it the "alumtius
of the Avaters"; and as to Avhat his dear dull friend had to
say about the fish, the eagle, and the rest, it Avas "nihil
ad rem"; for because the eagle could fly higher, it by
no means followed that the gnat could not fly at all,
etc., etc. He was ashamed, howeA'er, to dwell on such
trivialities, and thus to SAvell a gnat into an elephant; but,
for his own part, Avould only add that he had nothing deceit-
ful or double about him, neither Avas he to be caught Avhen
present by the false blandishments of those Avho slandered
him in his absence, agreeing rather with a Homeric senti-

278 ROMOLA.

unfortunately, a little too liigh, and obliged the small
observer to stand on a low stool of a rickety character;
but Tessa would have stood a long while in a much more
inconvenient position for the sake of seeing a little variety
in her life. 8he had been drawn to the opening at the
first loud tones of the strange voice speaking to Monna
Lisa; and darting gently across her room every now and
then to peeji at something, she continued to stand there
until the wood had been chopped, and she saw Baldassarre
enter the outhouse, as the dusk was gathering, and seat
himself oh the straw.

A great temptation had laid hold of Tessa's mind; she
would go and take that old man part of her supper, and
talk to him a little. He was not deaf like Monna Lisa,
and besides she could say a great many things to him that
it was no use to shout at Monna Lisa, who knew them
already. And he was a stranger — strangers came from a
long way off and went away again, and lived nowhere in
particular. It was naughty, she knew, for obedience made
the largest part in Tessa's idea of duty; but it would be
something to confess to the Padre next Pasqua, and there
was nothing else to confess except going to sleep some-
times over her beads, and being a little cross with Monna
Lisa because she was so deaf; for she had as much idleness
as she liked now, and was never frightened into telling
white lies. She turned away from her shutter with rather
an excited expression in her childish face, which was as
pretty and pouting as ever. Her garb was still that of a
simple contadina, but of a contadina prepared for a festa:
her gown of dark-green serge, with its red girdle, was
very clean and neat; she had the string of red glass beads
round her neck; and her brown hair, rough from curli-
ness, was duly knotted up, and fastened with the silver
pin. She had but one new ornament, and she was very
proud of it, for it was a fine gold ring.

Tessa sat on the low stool, nursing her knees, for a
minute or two, with her little soul poised in fluttering
excitement on the edge of this pleasant transgression. It
was quite irresistible. She had been commanded to make
no acquaintances, and warned that if she did, all her new
happy lot would vanish away, and be like a hidden treasure
that turned to lead as soon as it was brought to the day-
light; and she had been so obedient that when she had to
go to church she had kept her face shaded by her hood and
had pursed up her lips quite tightly. It was true her

BALDASSARRE MAKES AN AC(iUAIJN'TAKCE. ^?9

obedience liad been a little helped by her own dread lest the
alarming stepfather Xofri should turn up even in this
quarter, so far from the Por del Prato, and beat her at
least, if he did not drag her back to work for him. But
this old man was not an acquaintance; he was a poor
strano-er going to sleep in the outhouse, and he probably
knew\othing of stepfather Xofri; and, besides, if she took
him some supper, he would like her, and not want to tell
anything about her. Monna Lisa would say she must not
o-o and talk to him, therefore Monna Lisa must not be
consulted. It did not signify what she found out after it
had been done.

Supper was being prepared, she knew — a mountain o±
macaroni flavored with cheese, fragrant enough to tame
any stranger. So she tripped down-stairs with a mind full
of "deep designs, and first asking with an innocent look
what that noise of talking had been, without waiting for
an answer, knit her brow with a peremptory air, something
like a kitten trying to be formidable, and sent the old
woman up-stairs, saying she would chose to eat her supper
down below. In three minutes Tessa with her lantern m
one hand and a wooden bowl of macaroni in the other, was
kicking gently at the door of the outhouse; and Bal-
dassarre, roused from sad reverie, doubted in the first
moment whether he were awake as he opened the door and
saw this surprising little handmaid, with delight m her
wide eyes, breaking in on his dismal loneliness,

'^'ve brought you some supper," she said, lifting her
mouth toward his ear and shouting, as if he had been deaf
like Monna Lisa. " Sit down and eat it, while I stay
with you."

Surprise and distrust surmounted every other teelmg m
Baldassarre, but though he had no smile or word of grati-
tude ready, there could not be any impulse to push away
this visitant, and he sank down passively on his straw
again, while Tessa placed herself close to him, put the
wooden bowl on his lap, and set down the lantern m front
of them, crossing her hands before her, and nodding at the
bowl with a significant smile, as much as to sav, " les,
you may really eat it." For, in the excitement of cai-rymg
out her deed,^she had forgotten her previous thought that
the stranger would not be deaf, and had fallen into her
habitual alternative of dumb show and shouting.

The invitation was not a disagreeable one, for he had
been gnawing a remnant of dry bread, which had left

280 liOMOLA.

plenty of appetite for anything warm and relishing. Tessa
watched the disapj^earance of two or three mouthfuls
without speaking, for she had thought his eyes rather fierce
at first; but now she ventured to put her mouth to his ear
again and cry —

"I like my supper, don't you?"

It was not a smile, but rather the milder look of a dog
touched by kindness, but unable to smile, that Baldassarre
turned on this round blue-eyed thing that was caring about
him.

"Yes," he said; "but I can hear well — I'm not deaf."

"It is true; I forgot," said Tessa, lifting her hands and
clasping them. " But Monua Lisa is deaf, and I live with
her. She's a kind old woman, and I'm not frightened
at her. And we live very well: we have plenty of nice
things. I can have nuts if I like. And I'm not obliged
to work now. I nsed to have to work, and I didn't like it;
but I liked feeding the mules, and 1 should like to see poor
Giannetta, the little mule again. We've only got a goat
and two kids, and I used to talk to the goat a good deal,
because there was nobody else but Monna Lisa. But now
I've got something else — can yon guess what it is?"

She drew her head back, and looked with a challenging
smile at Baldassarre, as if she had proposed a difiicult
riddle to him.

"No," said he, putting aside his bowl, and looking at
her dreamily. It seemed as if this young prattling thing
were some memory come back out of his own youth.

"You like ms to talk to you, don't you?" said Tessa,
" but you must not tell anybody. Shall I fetch you a bit
of cold sausage?"

He shook his head, but he looked so mild now that
Tessa felt quite at her ease.

"Well, then, I've got a little baby. Such a pretty bam-
binetto, with little fingers and nails I Not old yet; it was
born at the Nativita, Monna Lisa says. I was married
one Nativita, a long, long while ago, and nobody knew. 0
Santa Madonna! I didn't mean to tell you that!"

Tessa set up her shoulders and bit her lip, looking at
Baldassarre as if this betrayal of secrets must have an
exciting effect on him too. But he seemed not to care
much; and perhaps that was the nature of strangers.

"Yes," she said, carrying on her thought aloud, "you
are a stranger, you don't live anywhere or know anybody,
do you ? "

BALDASSARRE MAKES AN ACQUAINTANCE. 281

*' No/' said Baldassarre, also thinking aloud, rather than
consciously answering, •' I only know one man/'

''His name is not Nofri, is it?" said Tessa, anxiously.

''No," said Baldassarre, noticing her look of fear. "Is
that your husband's name?"

That mistaken supposition was very amusing to Tessa.
She laughed and clapped her hands as she said —

"No, indeed! But I must not tell you anything about
my husband. You would never think what he is — not at
all like Norfri!"

She laughed again at the delightful incongruity between
the name of Nofri — which was not at all separable from
the idea of the cross-grained stepfather — and the idea of
her husband.

"But I don't see him very often," she went on, more
gravely. " And sometimes I pray to the Holy Madonna
to send him oftener, and once she did. But I must go
back to my bimbo now. I'll bring it to show you to-mor-
row. You would like to see it. Sometimes it cries and
makes a face, but only when it's hungry, Monna Lisa says.
You wouldn't think it, but Monna Lisa had babies once,
and they are all dead old men. My husband says she will
never die now, because she's so well dried. I'm glad of
that, for I'm fond of her. You would like to stay here
to-morrow, shouldn't you?"

"I should like to have this place to come and rest in,
that's all," said Baldassarre. " I would pay for it, and
harm nobody."

"No, indeed; I think you are not a bad old man. But
you look sorry about something. Tell me, is there any-
thing you shall cry about when I leave you by yourself? /
used to cry once."

" No, child; I think I shall cry no more."

"That's right; and I'll bring you some breakfast, and
show you the bimbo. Good-night."

Tessa took up her bowl and lantern, and closed the door
behind her. The pretty loving apparition had been no
more to Baldassarre than a faint rainbow on the blackness
to the man who is wrestling in deep waters. He hardly
thought of her again till his dreamy waking passed into
the more vivid images of disturbed sleep.

But Tessa thought much of him. She had no sooner
entered the house than she told Monna Lisa what she had
done, and insisted that the stranger should be allowed to
come and rest in the outhouse when he liked. The old

2S'^ KOMOLA.

woman, who had had her notious of making him a useful
tenant, made a great show of rehictance, shook lier head,
and urged that Messer ISTaldo would be angry if she let any
one come about the house. Tessa did not believe that.
Naldo had said nothing against strangers who lived
nowhere; and this old man knew nobody except one person,
who was not Nofri,

"Well," conceded Monna Lisa, at last, "if I let him
stay for a while and carry things up the hill for me, thou
must keep thy counsel and tell nobody."

"No," said Tessa, "I'll only tell the bimbo."

"And then," Monna Lista went on, in her thick under-
tone, " God may love us well enough not to let Messer
Naldo find out anything about it. For he never comes
here but at dark; and as he was here two days ago, it's
likely he'll never come at all till the old man's gone away
again."

"Oh me! Monna," said Tessa, clasping her hands, "I
wish Naldo had not to go such a long, long way sometimes
before he comes back again."

" Ah, child! the world's big, they say. There are places
behind the mountains, and if people go night and day,
night and day, they get to Rome, and see the Holy
Father."

Tessa looked submissive in the presence of this mystery,
and began to rock her baby, and sing syllables of vague
loving meaning, in tones that imitated a triple chime.

The next morning she was unusually industrious in the
prospect of more dialogue, and of the pleasure she should
give the poor old stranger by showing him her baby. But
before she could get ready to take Baldassarre his break-
fast, she found that Monna Lisa had been employing him
as a drawer of water. She deferred her paternosters, and
hurried down to insist that Baldassarre should sit on his
straw, so that she might come and sit by him again while
he ate his breakfast. That attitude made the new com-
panionshij) all the more delightful to Tessa, for she had
been used to sitting on straw in old days along with her
goats and mules.

"I will not let Monna Lisa give you too much work to
do," she said, bringing him some steaming broth and soft
bread. "I don't like much work, and I daresay you
don't. I like sitting in the sunshine and feeding things.
Monna Lisa says work is good, but she does it all herself,
so I don't mind. She's not a cross old woman; you needn't

BALDASSARKE MAKES AX ACQUAINTANCE. ;^83

be afraid of licr being cross. And now, you eat that, and
I'll go and fetch my baby and sliow it you."

Presently she came back with the small mummy-case in
her arms. The mummy looked very lively, having un-
usually large dark eyes, though no more than the usual
indication of a future nose.

'' This is my baby," said Tessa, seating herself close to
Baldassarre. "You didn't think it was so pretty, did
you? It is like the little Gesu, and I should think the
Santa Madonna would be kinder to me now, is it not true?
But I have not much to ask for, because I have everything
now — only that I should see my husband oftener. You
may hold the bambino a little, if you like, but I think you
must not kiss him, because you might hurt him."

She spoke this prohibition in a tone of soothing
excuse, and Baldassarre could not refuse to hold the small
package. "Poor thing! poor thing!" he said, in a deep
voice which had something strangely threatening in its
apparent pity. It did not seem to him as if this guileless
loving little woman could reconcile him to the world at
all, but rather that she was with him against the world,
that she was a creature who would need to be avenged.

" Oh, don't you be sorry for me," she said; "for though
I don't see him often, he is more beautiful and good than
anybody else in the world. I say prayers to him when
he's away. You couldn't think what he is! "

She looked at Baldassarre with a wide glance of mys-
terious meaning, taking the baby from him again, and
almost wishing he would question her as if he wanted very
much to know more.

" Yes, I could," said Baldassarre, rather bitterly.

"No, I'm sure you never could," said Tessa, earnestly.
"You thought he might be Nofri," she added, with a
triumphant air of conclusiveness. But never mind; you
couldn't know. What is your name?"

He rubbed his hand over his knitted brow, then looked
at her blankly and said, "Ah, child, what is it?"

It was not that he did not often remember his name
well enough; and if he had had presence of mind now to
remember it, he would have chosen not to tell it. But a
sudden question appealing to his memory, had a paralyzing
ett'ect, and in that moment he was conscious of nothing
but helplessness.

Ignorant as Tessa was, the pity stirred in her by his
blank look taught her to say —

284 ROMOLA.

''Never mind: you are a stranger, it is no matter about
your having a name. Good-bye now, because I want my
breakfast. You will come here and rest when you like;
Monna Lisa says you may. And don't you be unhappy,
for we'll be good to you."

"Poor thing!" said Baldassarre again.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

N'O PLACE FOR REPENTANCE.

Messer Naldo came again sooner than was expected:
he came on the evening of the twenty-eighth of November,
only eleven days after his previous visit, proving that he
had not gone far beyond the mountains; and a scene which
we have witnessed as it took place that evening in the Via
de Bardi may help to explain the impulse which turned
his steps toward the hill of San Giorgio.

When Tito had first found this home for Tessa, on his
return from Eome, more than a year and a half ago, he
had acted, he persuaded himself, simply under the con-
straint imposed on him by his own kindliness after the
unlucky incident which had made foolish little Tessa
imagine him to be her husband. It was true that the
kindness was manifested toward a pretty trusting thing
wliom it was impossible to be near without feeling
inclined to caress and pet her; but it was not less true
tliat Tito had movements of kindness toward her apart
from any contemplated gain to himself. Otherwise,
charming as her prettiness and prattle were in a lazy mo-
ment, he might have preferred to be free from her; for be
was not in love with Tessa — he was in love for the first
time in his life with an entirely different woman, whom he
was not simply inclined to shower caresses upon, but whose
presence possessed him so that the simple sweep of her
long tresses across his cheek seemed to vilDrate through the
hours. All the young, ideal passion he had in him had
been stirred by Romola, and his fibre was too fine, his
intellect too bright for him to be tempted into the habits
of a gross pleasure-seeker. But he had spun a web about
himself and Tes&a, which lie fell incapable of l)reaking: in
the first moments after the mimic marriage he had been

XO PLACE FOR REPEXTANCE. 285

prompted to leave her under an illusion by a distinct calcu-
lation of his own possible need, but since that critical
moment it seemed to him that the web had gone on spin-
ning itself in spite of him, like a growth over which he
had no power. The elements of kindness and self-indul-
gence are hard to distinguisli in a soft nature like Tito's;
and the annoyance he had felt under Tessa's pursuit of
him on the day of his betrothal, the thorough intention of
revealing the truth to her with which he set out to fulfil
his promise of seeing her again, were a sufficiently strong
argument to him that in ultimately leaving Tessa under
her illusion and providing a home for her, he had been
overcome by his own kindness. iVnd in these days of his
first devotion to Eomola he needed a self-justifying argu-
ment. He had learned to be glad that she was deceived
about some things. But every strong feeling makes to
itself a conscience of its own — has its own piety; just as
much as the feeling of the son toward the mother, which
will sometimes survive amid the worst fumes of deprav-
ation; and Tito could not yet be easy in committing a
secret offense against his wedded love.

But he was all the more careful in taking precautions to
preserve the secrecy of the offense. Monna Lisa, who,
like many of her class, never left her habitation except to
go to one or two particular shops, and to confession once a
year, knew nothing of his real name or whereabout: she
only knew that he paid her so as to make her very comfort-
able, and minded little about the rest, save that she got
fond of Tessa, and found pleasure in the cares for which
she was paid. There was some mystery behind, clearly,
since Tessa was a contadina, and Messer Xaldo was a sig-
nor; but, for aught Monna Lisa knew, he might be a real
husband. For Tito had thoroughly frightened Tessa into
silence about the circumstances of their marriage, by
telling her that if she broke that silence she would never
see him again; and Monna Lisa's deafness, which made it
impossible to say anything to her without some premedita-
, tion, had saved Tessa from any incautious revelation to her,
such as had run off her tongue in talking with Baldassarre.
For a long while Tito's visits were so rare, that it seemed
likely enough he took journeys between them. They
were prompted chiefly by the desire to see that all
things were going on well with Tessa; and though
he always found his visit pleasanter than the prospect of
it — always felt anew the charm of that pretty ignorant

286 KOMOLA.

lovingness and trust — he had not yet any real need of it.
But he was determined, if possible, to preserve the sim-
plicity on which the charm depended: to keep Tessa a
genuine contadina, and not place the small field-flower
among conditions that would rob it of its grace. He
would have been shocked to see her in the dress of any
other rank than her own; the piquancy of her talk would
be all gone, if things began to have new relations for her,
if her world became wider, her pleasures less childish;
and the squirrel-like enjoyment of nuts at discretion
marked the standard of the luxuries he had provided for
her. By this means, Tito saved Tessa's charm from being
sullied; and he also, by a convenient coincidence, saved
himself from aggravating expenses that were already
rather importunate to a man whose money was all required
for his avowed habits of life.

This, in brief, had been the history of Tito's relation to
Tessa up to a very recent date. It is true that once or
twice before Bardo's death, the sense that there was Tessa
up the hill, with whom it was possible to pass an hour
agreeably, had been an inducement to him to escape from
a little weariness of the old man, when, for lack of any
positive engagement, he might otherwise have borne the
weariness patiently and shared Eomola's burden. But
the moment when he had first felt a real hunger for
Tessa's ignorant lovingness and belief in him had not
come till quite lately, and it was distinctly marked out by
circumstances as little to be forgotten as the oncoming of
a malady that has permanently vitiated the sight and
hearing. It was the day when he had first seen Bal-
dassarre, and had bought the armor. Eeturning across
the bridge that night, with the coat of mail in his hands,
he had felt an unconquerable shrinking from an immediate
encounter Avith Eomola. She, too, knew little of the
actual world; she, too, trusted him; but he had an uneasy
I consciousness that behind her frank eyes there was a
nature that could judge him, and that any ill-founded
trust of hers sprang not from pretty brute-like incapacity^
but from a nobleness which might prove an alarming
touchstone. He wanted a little ease, a little repose from
self-control, after the agitation and exertions of the day;
he wanted to be where he could adjust his mind to the
morrow, without caring hoAV he behaved at the present
moment. And there was a sweet adoiing creature within
reach whose presence was as safe and unconstraining as

NO PLACE FOR EEPENTA^„_ ;^87

that of her own kids — who would believe any fable, and
remained quite unimpressed by public opinion. And so
on that evening, when Eomola was waiting and listening
for him, he turned his steps up the hill.

No wonder, then, that the steps took the same course
on this evening, eleven days later, when he had had to
recoil under Eomola's first outburst of scorn. He could
not wish Tessa in his wife's place, or refrain from wishing
that his wife should be thoroughly reconciled to him; for
it was Eomola, and not Tessa, that belonged to the world
where all the larger desires of a man who had ambition
and effective faculties must necessarily lie. But he wanted
a refuge from a standard disagreeably rigorous, of which
he could not make himself independent simply by think-
ing it folly; and Tessa's little soul was that inviting
refuge.

It was not much more than eight o'clock when he went
up the stone steps to the door of Tessa's room. Usually
she heard his entrance into the house, and ran to meet him,
but not to-night; and when he opened the door he saw
the reason. A single dim light was burning above the
dying fire, and showed Tessa in a kneeling attitude by the
head of the bed where the baby lay. Her head had fallen
aside on the pillow, and her brown rosary, which usually
hung above the pillow over the picture of the Madonna
and the golden palm-branches, lay in the loose grasp of her
right hand. She had gone fast asleep over her beads.
Tito stepped lightly across the little room, and sat down
close to her. She had probably heard the opening of the
door as part of her dream, for he had not been looking at
her two moments before she opened her eyes. She opened
them without any start, and remained quite motionless
looking at him, as if the sense that he was there smiling
at her shut out any impulse which could disturb that happy
passiveness. But when he put his hand under her chin,
and stooped to kiss her, she said —

"I dreamed it, and then I said it was dreaming — and
then I woke, and it was true."

''Little sinner!" said Tito, pinching her chin, ''you
have not said half your prayers. I will punish you by not
looking at your baby; it is ugly."

Tessa did not like those words, even though Tito was
smiling. She had some pouting distress in her face, as
she said, bending anxiously over the baby —

"Ah, it is not true I He is prettier than anything.

288 BC^'OLA,

You do no'J^uiink he is ugly. You will look at him. He
is even prettier than when you saw him before — only he's
asleep, and you can't see his eyes or his tongue,, and I can't
show you his hair — and it grows — isn't it wonderful?
Look at him! It's true his face is very much all alike
when he's asleep, there is not so much to see as when he's
awake. If you kiss him very gently, he won't wake: you
want to kiss him, is it not true?"

He satisfied her by giving the small mummy a butterfly
kiss, and then putting his hand on her shoulder and turn-
ing her face toward him, said, '''You like looking at the
baby better than looking at your husband, you false one!"

She was still kneeling, and now rested her hands on his
knee, looking up at him like one of Fra Lippo Lippi's
round-cheeked adoring angels.

"No," she said, shaking her head; "I love you always
best, only I want you to look at the bambino and love him;
I used only to want you to love me."

"And did you expect me to come again so soon?" said
Tito, inclined to make her prattle. He still felt the effects
of the agitation he had undergone — still felt like a man
who has been violently jarred; and this was the easiest
relief from silence and solitude.

"Ah, no," said Tessa, "I have counted the days —
to-day I began at my right thumb again — since you put
on the beautiful chain-coat, that Messer San Michele gave
you to take care of you on your journey. And you bave
got it on now," she said, peeping through the opening in
the breast of his tunic, " Perhaps it made you come back
sooner,"

" Perhaps it did, Tessa," he said, " But don't mind the
coat now. Tell me what has happened since I was here.
Did you see the tents in the Prato, and the soldiers and
horsemen when they passed the bridges — did you hear
the drums and trumpets?"

"Yes, and I vras rather frightened, because I thought
the soldiers might come up here. And Monna Lisa was a
little afraid too, for she said they might carry our kids off;
slie said it was their business to do mischief. But the
Holy Madonna took care of us, for we never saw one of
them up hero. But something has happened, only I
hardly dare tell you, and that is what I was saying more
Aves for."

"What do you mean, Tessa?" said Tito, rather
anxiously. "Make haste and tell me."

]S'0 PLACE FOR REPEXiJuKCB. 289

"Yes, but will you let me sit on your knee? Because
then I think I shall not be so frightened."

He took her on his knee, and put his arm round her,
but looked grave: it seemed that something unpleasant
must pursue him even here,

''At first I didn't mean to tell you," said Tessa, speak-
ing almost in a whisper, as if that would mitigate the
offense; "because we thought the old man would be gone
away before you came again, and it would be as if it had
not been. But now he is there, and you are come, and I
never did anything you told me not to do before. And I
want to tell you, and then you will perhaps forgive me,
for it is a long while before I go to confession."

"Yes, tell me everything, my Tessa." He began to
hope it was after all a trivial matter.

"Oh, you will be sorry for him: I'm afraid he cries
about something when I don't see him. But that was not
the reason I went to him first; it was because I wanted to
talk to him and show him my baby, and he was a stranger
that lived nowhere, and I thought you wouldn't care so
much about my talking to him. And I think he is not a
bad old man, and he wanted to come and sleep on the
straw next to the goats, and I made Monna Lisa say, ' Yes,
he might,' and he's away all the day almost, but when he
comes back I talk to him, and take him something to eat."

"Some beggar, I suppose. It was naughty of you,
Tessa, and I am angry with Monna Lisa. I must have
him sent away."

"No, I think he is not a beggar, for he wanted to pay
Monna Lisa, only she asked him to work for her instead.
And he gets himself shaved, and his clothes are tidy:
Monna Lisa^says he is a decent man. But sometimes I think
he is not in his right mind: Lupo, at Peretola, was not in
his right mind, and he looks a little like Lupo sometimes,
as if he didn't know where he was."

" What sort of face has he? " said Tico, his heart begin-
ning to beat strangely. He was so haunted by the thought
of Baldassarre, that it was already he whom he saw in
imagination sitting on the straw not many yards from him.
" Fetch your stool, my Tessa, and sit on it."

"Shall you not forgive me?" she said, timidly, moving
from his knee.

" Yes, I will not be angry — only ;?it down, and tell me
what sort of old man this is."

"I can't think how to tell you: ]i'} is not like mv step-
19

;i90 BOMOLA.

father Nofri, or anybody. His face is yellow, and he has
deep marks in it; and his hair is white, but there is none
on the top of his head: and his eye-brows are black, and
he looks from under them at me, and says, 'Poor thing!'
to me, as if he thought I was beaten as I used to be; and
that seems as if he couldn't be in his right mind, doesn't
it? And I asked him his name once, but he couldn't tell
me: yet everybody has a name — is it not true? And he
has a book now, and keeps looking at it ever so long, as if
he were a Padre. But I think he is not saying prayers,
for his lips never move; — ah, you are angry with me, or is
it because you are sorry for the old man?"

Tito's eyes were still fixed on Tessa; but he had ceased
to see her, and was only seeing the objects her words
suggested. It was this absent glance which frightened
her, and she could not help going to neel at his side again.
But he did not heed her, and she dared not touch him, or
speak to him: she knelt, trembling and wondering; and
this state of mind suggested her beads to her, she took
them from the floor and began to tell them again, her
pretty lips moving silently, and her blue eyes wide with
anxiety and struggling tears.

Tito was quite unconscious of her movements — uncon-
scious of his own attitude: he was in that wrapt state in
which a man will grasp painful roughness, and press and
press it closer, and never feel it. A new possibility had
risen before him, which might dissolve at once the wretched
conditions of fear and suppression that were marring his
life. Destiny had brought Avithin his reach an opi)ortunit3'
of retrieving that moment on the steps of the Duomo,
when the past had grasped him with living quivering-
hands, and he had disowned it. A few stej)s, and he might
be face to face with his father, with no witness by; ho
might seek forgiveness and reconciliation; and there was
money now, from the sale of the library, to enable them to
leave Florence without disclosure and go into Southern Italy,
where under the probable French rule, he had already laid
a foundation for patronage. Komola need never know the
whole truth, for she could have no certain means of iden-
tifying that prisoner in the Duomo with Baldassarre, or of
learning what had taken place on the steps, except from
Baldassarre himself; and if his father forgave, he would
also consent to bury that offense.

But with this ])n8,sibility of relief, by an easy spring,
from present evil, there rose the other possibility, that the

NO PLACE FOK KEPEXTANCE. :iyl

fierce-hearted man might refuse to be propitiated. Well —
and if he did, things would only be as they had been
before; for there would be no witness hy. It was not
repentance with a white sheet round it and taper in hand,
confessing its hated sin in the eyes of men, that Tito was
preparing for: it was a repentance that would make all
things })leasant again, and keep all past unpleasant things
secret. And Tito's soft-heartedness, his indisposition to
feel himself in harsh relations with any creature, was in
strong activity toward his father, now his father was
brought near to him. It would be a state of ease that his
nature could not but desire, if the poisonous hatred in
Baldassarre's glance could be replaced by something of the
old affection and comi:)lacency.

Tito longed to have his world once again completely
cushioned with goodwill, and longed for it the more
eagerly because of what he had just suffered from the col-
lision with Romola. It was not difficult to him to smile
pleadingly on those whom he had injured, and offer to do
them much kindness: and no quickness of intellect could
tell him exactly the taste of that honey on the lips_ of the
injured. The" opportunity was there, and it raised an
inclination which hemmed in the calculating activity of
his thought. He started up, and stepped toward the door;
but Tessa's cry, as she dropped her beads, roused him from
his absorption. He turned and said —

" My Tessa, get me a lantern; and don't cry, little
pigeon, I am not angry."

They went down the stairs, and Tessa was going to
shout the need of the lantern in Monna Lisa's ear, when
Tito, -who had opened the door, said, ''Stay, Tessa— no,
I want no lantern: go up-stairs again, and keep quiet, and
say nothing to Monna Lisa."

In half a minute he stood before the closed door of the
outhouse, where the moon was shining white on the old
paintless wood.

In this last decisive moment, Tito felt a tremor upon
him — a sudden instinctive shrinking from a possible tiger-
glance, possible tiger-leap. Yet why should he, a young
man, be afraid of an old one? a young man with armor
on, of an old man without a weapon? It was but a
moment's hesitation, and Tito laid his hand on the door.
Was his father asleep? Was there nothing else but the
door that screened him from the voice and the glance
-which rio magic could tttrn into ease?^ -

292 KOilOLA.

Baldassarre was not asleep. There was a square opening
high in the wall of the hovel, through which the moon-
beams sent in a stream of pale light; and if Tito could
have looked through the oj)ening, he would have seen his
father seated on the straw, with something that shone like
a white star in his hand. Baldassarre was feeling the edge
of his poinard, taking refuge in that sensation from a
hopeless blank of thought that seemed to lie like a great
gulf between his passion and its aim.

He was in one of his most wretched moments of con-
scious lielplessness: he had been poring, while it was light,
over the book that lay open beside him; then he had been
trying to recall the names of his jewels, and the symbols
engraved on them; and though at certain other times he
had recovered some of those names and symbols, to-night
they w^ere all gone into darkness. And this effort at
inward seeing had seemed to end in utter paralysis of
memory. He was reduced to a sort of mad consciousness
that he was a solitary pulse of just rage in a world filled
with defiant baseness. He had clutched and unsheathed
his dagger, and for a long while had been feeling its edge,
his mind narrowed to one image, and the dream of one
sensation — the sensation of plunging tliat dagger into a
base heart, which he was unable to pierce in any other way.

Tito had his hand on the door and was pulling it; it
dragged against the ground as such old doors often do, and
Baldassarre, startled out of his dream-like state, rose from
his sitting posture in vague amazement, not knowing where
he was. He had not yet risen to his feet, and was still
kneeling on one knee, when the door came wide open and
he saw, dark against the moonlight, with the rays falling
on one bright mass of curls and one rounded olive cheek,
the image of his reverie — not shadowy — close and real like
water at the lips after the thirsty dream of it. Xo thought
could come athwart that eager thirst. In one moment,
before Tito could start back, the old man, with the pre-
ternatural force of rage in his limbs, had sprung forward,
and the dagger had fiashed out. In the next moment the
dagger had snapped in two, and Baldassarre, under the
parrying force of Tito's arm, had fallen back on the straw,
cluciiing the hilt with its bit of broken blade. The
pointed end lay shinning against Tito's feet.

Tito had felt one great heart-leap of terror as he had
staggered under the weight of the thrust; he felt now the
triumph of deliverance and safety. His armor had been

NO PLACE FOR REPEJSTTAXCE. 293

proved, and vengeance lay helpless before him. But the
triumph raised no devilish impulse; on the contrary, the
sight of his father close to him and unable to injure him,
made the effort at reconciliation easier. He was free from
fear, but he had only the more unmixed and direct want
to be free from the sense that he was hated. After they
had looked at each other a little while, Baldassarre lying
motionless in despairing rage, Tito said m his soft tones,
just as they had sounded before the last parting on the
shores of Greece —

*' Padre niio! " There was a pause after those words,
but no movement or sound till he said —

" I came to ask your forgiveness!"

Again he paused, that the healing balm of those words
might have time to work. But there was no sign of change
in Baldassarre; he lay as he had fallen, leaning on one
arm: he was trembling, but it was from the shock that had
thrown him down.

" I Avas taken by surprise that morning. I wish now to
be a son to you again. I wish to make the rest of your
life happy, that you may forget what you have suffered.''

He paused again. He had used the clearest and strong-
est words he could think of. It was useless to say more,
until he had some sign that Baldassarre understood him.
Perhaps his mind was too distemptered or too imbecile
even for that; perhaps the shock of his fall and his disap-
pointed rage might have quite suspended the use of his
faculties.

Presently Baldassarre began to move. He threw away
the broken dagger, and slowly and gradually, still trem-
bling, began to raise himself from the ground. Tito put
out his hand to help him, and so strangely quick are men's
souls that in this moment, when he began to feel his
atonement was accepted, he had a darting thought of the
irksome efforts it entailed. Baldassarre clutched the hand
that was held out, raised himself and clutched it still,
going close up to Tito till their faces were not a foot off
each other. Then he began to speak, in a deep trembling
voice —

"I saved you — I nurtured you — I loved you. You
forsook me — you robbed me — you denied me. What can
you give me? You have made "the world bitterness to me;
but there is one draught of sweetness left — that yon shall
knoiv agony."

He let fall Tito's hand, and going backwards a little.

394 ROMOLA.

first rested his arm on a j)rojecting stone in the wall, and
then sank again in a sitting posture on the straw. The
ontleap of fury in the dagger -thrust had evidently
exhausted him.

Tito stood silent. If it had been a deep yearning emo-
tion which had brought him to ask his father's forgive-
ness, the denial of it might have caused him a pang, which
would have excluded the rushing train of thought that
followed those decisive words. As it was, though the sen-
tence of unchangeable hatred grated on him and jarred
him terribly, bis mind glanced round with a self-preserving
instinct to see how far those words could have the force of
a substantial threat. When he had come down to speak
to Baldassarre, he had said to himself that if his effort
at reconciliation failed, things would only be as they had
been before. The first glance of his mind was backward
to tliat thought again, but the future possibilities of danger
that were conjured up along with it brought the percep-
tion that things were not as they had been before, and the
perception came as a triumphant relief. There was not
only the broken dagger, there was the certainty, from
what Tessa had told him, that Baklassarre's mind was
broken too, and had no edge that could reach him. Tito
felt he had no choice now: he must defy Baldassarre as a
mad, imbecile old man; and the chances were so strongly
on his side that there was hardly room for fear. No ;
except the fear of having to do many unpleasant things
in order to save himself from what was yet more unpleas-
ant. And one of those unpleasant things must be done
immediately: it was very difficult.

" Do you mean to stay here?" he said.

"No," said Baldassarre, bitterly, "you mean to turn
me out."

"Not so," said Tito; "I only ask."

"I tell you, you have turned me out. If it is your
straw, you turned me off it three years ago."

"Then you mean to leave this place?" said Tito, more
anxious about this certainty than tlie ground of it.

"I have spoken," said Baldassarre.

Tito turned and re-entered the house. Monna Lisa was
nodding; he went up to Tessa, and found her crying by
the side of her baby.

"Tessa," he said, sitting down and taking her head
between his hands; "leave off' crying, little goose and
listen to rae,"

WHAT FLOREXCE WAS THI]SrKI]SrG OF. 295

He lifted her chin upward, that she might look at him,
while he spoke very distinctly and emphatically.

"You must never speak to that old man again. He is
a mad old man, and he wants to kill me. Never speak to
him or listen to him again."

Tessa's tears had ceased, and her lips were pale with
fright.

*'Is he gone away?" she whispered.

" He will go away. Remember what I have said to you."

" Yes; I will never speak to a stranger any more," said
Tessa, with a sense of guilt.

He told her, to comfort her, that he would come again
to-morrow; and then went down to Monna Lisa to rebuke
her severely for letting a dangerous man come about the
house.

Tito felt that these were odious tasks; they were very
evil-tasted morsels but they were forced upon him. He
heard Monna Lisa fasten the door behind him, and turned
away, without looking towal'd the open door of the hovel.
He felt secure that Baldassarre would go, and he could
not wait to see him go. Even his young frame and elastic
spirit were shattered by the agitations that had been
crowded into this single evening.

Baldassarre was still sitting on the straw when the
shadow of Tito passed by. Before him lay the fragments
of the broken dagger; beside him lay the open book, over
which lie had pored in vain. They looked like mocking
symbols of his utter helj^lessness; and his body was still
too trembling for him to rise and walk away.

But the next morning very early, when Tessa peeped
anxiously through the hole in her shutter, the door of the
hovel was open, and the strange old man was gone.

CHAPTER XXXV.

WHAT FLOREKCE WAS THI]S"KI]S"G OF.

For several days Tito saw little of Romola. He told
her gently, the next morning, that it would be better for
her to remove any small articles of her own from the
library, as there would be agents coming to pack up the
antiquities. Then, leaning to kiss her on the brow, he

296 ROMOLA.

suggested that she should keep in her own room where the
little painted tabernacle was, and where she was then sit-
ting, so that she might be away from the noise of strange
footsteps. Romola assented quietly, making no sign of emo-
tion: the night had been one long waking to lier, and, in spite
of her healthy frame, sensation had become a dull contin-
uous pain, as if she had been stunned and bruised. Tito
divined that she felt ill, but he dared say no more; he only
dared, perceiving that her hand and brow were stone cold,
to fetch a furred mantle and throw it lightly round her.
And in every brief interval that he returned to her, the
scene was nearly the same: he tried to propitiate her by
some unobtrusive act or word of tenderness, and she
seemed to have lost the power of speaking to him, or of
looking at him. '^Patiencel" he said to himself. '*'She
will recover it, and forgive at last. The tie to me must still
remain the strongest." When the stricken person is slow
to recover and looks as if nothing had happened, the
striker easily glides into the position of the aggrieved
party; he feels no bruise himself, and is strongly conscious
of his own amiable behavior since he inflicted the blow.
But Tito was not naturally disposed to feel himself ag-
grieved; the constant bent of his mind was toward pro])i-
tiation, and he would have submitted to much for the sake
of feeling Romola's hand resting on his head again, as it
did that morning when he first shrank from looking at lier.
But he found it the less difficult to wait patiently for the
return of his home happiness, because his life out of doors
was more and more interesting to him. A course of action
which is in strictness a slowly-prepared outgrowth of the
entire character, is yet almost always traceable to a single
impression as its point of apparent origin; and since that
moment in the Piazza del Duomo, when Tito, mounted on
the bales, had tasted a keen pleasure in the consciousness
of his ability to tickle the ears of men with any phrases
that pleased them, his imagination had glanced continu-
ally toward a sort of political activity which the troubled
public life of Florence was likely enough to find occasion
for. But the fresh dread of Baldassarre, waked in the
same moment, had lain like an immovable rocky obstruc-
tion across that path, and had urged him into the sale of
the library, as a preparation for the possible necessity of
leaving Florence, at the very time when he was beginning
to feel that it had a new attraction for him. That dread
was nearly removed now: he must wear his armor still: he

WHAT FLORENCE WAS THIKKING OF. 297

must prepare himself for possible demands on his coolness
and ingenuity, but he did not feel obliged to take the
inconvenient 'step of leaving Florence and seeking new
fortunes. His father had refused the offered atonement —
had forced him into defiance; and an old man in a strange
place, Avith his memory gone, was weak enough to be
defied.

Tito's implicit desires were working themselves out now
in very explicit thoughts. As the freshness of young
passion faded, life was taking more and more decidedly
for him the aspect of a game in which there was an agree-
able mingling of skill and chance.

And the game that might be played in Florence promised
to be rapid and exciting; it was a game of revolutionary •
and party struggle, sure to include plenty of that unavowed
action in which brilliant ingenuity, able to get rid of all
inconvenient beliefs, except that ''ginger is hot in the
mouth," is apt to see the path of superior wisdom.

No sooner were the French guests gone than Florence
was as agitated as a colony of ants when an alarming
shadow has been removed, and the camp has to be repaired.
" How are we to raise the money for the French king?
How are we to manage the war with those obstinate Pisan
rebels? Above all, how are we to mend our plan of gov-
ernment, so as to hit on the best way of gettmg our
magistrates chosen and our laws voted?" Till those ques-
tions were well answered, trade was in danger of standing
still, and that large body of the working men who were
not counted as citizens and had not so much as a vote to
serve as an anodyne to their stomachs were likely to get
impatient. Something must be done.

And first the great bell was sounded to call the citizens
to a parliament in the Piazza de Signori; and when the
crowd was wedged close, and hemmed in by armed men
at all the outlets, the Signoria (or Gonfaloiere and eight
Priors for the time being) came out and stood by the stone
lion on the platform in front of the Old Palace, and pro-
posed that twenty chief men of the city should have
dictatorial authority given them, by force of which they
should for one year choose all magistrates, and set the
frame of government in order. And the people shouted
their assent, and felt themselves the electors of the Twenty.
This kind of ''parliament" was a very old Florentine
fashion, by which the will of the few was made to seem the
choice of the many.

298 EOMOLA.

The shouting iu the Piazza was soon at an end, but not
so the debating inside the palace: was Florence to have
a Great Council after the A^enetian mode, where all the
officers of government might be elected, and all laws votod
by a Avide number of citizens of a certain age and of ascer-
tained qualifications, without question of rank or party?
or, was it to be governed on a narrower and less pop-
ular scheme, in which the hereditary influence of good
families would be less adulterated with the votes of shop-
keepers. Doctors of law disputed day after day, and far
on into the night. Messer Pagolantonio Soderini alleged
excellent reasons on the side of the popular scheme;
Messer Guidantonia Vespucci alleged reasons equally
excellent on the side of a more aristocratic form. It was
a question of boiled or roast, which had been prejudged
by the palates of the disputants, and the excellent arguing
might have been protracted a long while without any other
result than that of deferring the cooking. The majority
of the men inside the palace, having power already in their
hands, agreed with Vespucci, and thought change should
be moderate; the majority outside the palace, conscious
of little power and many grievances, Avere less afraid of

And there Avas a force outside the palace which Avas
gradually tending to give the vague desires of the majority
the character of a determinate will. That force was the
preaching of Savonarola. Impelled partly by the spiritual
necessity that Avas laid upon him to guide the people, and
partly by the prompting of public men Avho could get no
measures carried Avithout his aid, he was rapidly passing
in his daily sermons from the general to the special — from
telling his hearers that they must postjione their private
passions and interests to the public good, to telling them
precisely Avhat sort of government they must have in order
to promote that good — from " Choose Avhatever is best for
all" to ''Choose the Great Council," and "the Great
Council is the Avill of God."

To Savonarola these Avere as good as identical proposi-
tions. The Great Council Avas the only practicable plan
for giving an expression to the public Avill large enough to
counteract the vitiating influence of jiarty interests: it was
a plan that would make honest impartial public action at
least ])ossible. And the purer the government of Florence
would become — the more secure from the designs of men
who saAv their own advantage in the moral debasement of

ARIADXE DISCROWNS HERSELF. 299

their fellows — the nearer would the Florentine people
approach the character of a pure community, worthy to
lead the way in the renovation of the Church and the
world. And Fra Girolamo's mind never stopped short of
that sublimest end: the objects toward which he felt
himself working had always the same moral magnificence.
He had no private malice — he sought no petty gratifica-
tion. Even in the last terrible days, when ignominy,
torture, and the fear of torture, had laid bare every hidden
weakness of his soul, he could say to his importunate
judges: "Do not wonder if it seems to you that I have
told but few things; for my purposes were few and great."*

CHAPTEE XXXVr.

ABIADNE DISCROWNS HERSELF.

It was more than three weeks before the contents of the
library were all packed and carried away. And Romola,
instead of shutting her eyes and ears, had watched the
process. The exhaustion consequent on violent emotion
is apt to bring a dreamy disbelief in the reality of its
cause; and in the evening, when the workmen were gone,
Romola took her hand-lamp and walked slowly round
amongst the confusion of straw and wooden cases, pausing
at every vacant pedestal, every well-known object laid
prostrate, with a sort of bitter desire to assure herself that
there was a sufficient reason why her love was gone and
the world was barren for her. And still, as the evenings
came, she went and went again; no longer to assure her-
self, but because this vivifying of pain and despair about
her father's memory was the strongest life left to her affec-
tions. On the twenty-third of December, she knew that
the last packages were going. She ran to the loggia at the
top of the house that she might not lose the last pang of
seeing the slow wheels move across the bridge.

It was a cloudy day, and nearing dusk. Arno ran dark
and shivering; the hills were mournful; and Florence with
its girdling stone towers had that silent, tomb-like look,
which unbroken shadow gives to a city seen from above.

* " Se vi pare che io abbia detto poche cose, non ve ne maravigliate,
perche le mie cose erano poche e grandi."

300 ROMOLA.

Santa Croce, where her father lay, was dark amidst that
darkness, and slowly crawling over the bridge, and slowly
vanishing up the narrow street, was the white load, like a
ernel, deliberate Fate carrying her father's lifelong hope to
bury it in an unmarked grave. Romola felt less that she
was seeing this herself than that her father was conscious
of it as he lay helpless under the imprisoning stones,
where her hand could not reach his to tell him that he was
not alone.

She stood still even after the load had disappeared,
heedless of the cold, and soothed by the gloom which
seemed to cover her like a mourning garment and shut out
the discord of joy. "When suddenly the great bell in the
palace-tower rang out a mighty peal: not the hammer-
sound of alarm, but an agitated peal of triumph; and one
after another every other bell in every other tower seemed
to catch the vibration and join the chorus. And, as the
chorus swelled and swelled till the air seemed made of
Found — little flames, vibrating too, as if the sound had
caught fire, burst out between the turrets of the palace and
on the girdling towers.

That sudden clang, that leaping light, fell on Romola
like sharp wounds. They were the triumph of demons at
the success of her husband's treachery, and the desolation
of her life. Little more than three weeks ago she had
been intoxicated with the sound of those very bells; and
in the gladness of Florence, she had heard a prophecy of
her own gladness. But now the general joy seemed cruel
to her: sbe stood aloof from tliat common life — that Flor-
ence which was flinging out its loud exultation to stun the
ears of sorrow and loneliness. She could never join hands
with gladness again, but only with those whom it was in
the hard nature of gladness to forget. And in her bitter-
ness she felt that all rejoiciug was mockery. Men shouted
paeans with tlieir souls full of heaviness, and then looked
in their neighbors' faces to see if there was really such a
thing as joy. Romola had lost her belief in the happiness
she had once thirsted for: it was a hateful, smiling, soft-
handed thing, with a narrow, selfish heart.

She ran down from the loggia, with her hands pressed
against her ears, and was hurrying across the antechamber,
when she was startled by unexpectedly meeting her hus-
band, who was coming to seek her.

His step was elastic, and there was a radiance of satis-
faction about him not quite usual.

ARIADNE DISCROWNS HERSELF. 301

''TVhatl the noise was a little too much for you?" lie
said- for Romola, as she started at the sight of l^mi had
pressed her hands all the closer against her ears. He took
C aently by the wrist, and drew her arm withm his
leadiS- her into the saloon surrounded with the dancing
nymphs and fauns, and then went on speaking: -Florence
s^Ze quite mad at getting its Great Council, which is to
Dufan end to all the evils under the sun; especially the
^fce of mernment. You may well look stunned my
Romola, and you are cold. You must not stay so late
viX that windy loggia without wrappings. I ^v'as coming
lo ten you that fanfsuddenly called to Rome about some
learned business for Bernardo Rucellai. I /^ going
away immediately, for I am te 30m my party at San Gag-
7o to-night, that we may start early in the morning. I
need crive" you no trouble; I have had my packages made
alrealy. It will not be very long before I am back Jg^^^'

He knew he had nothing to expect from her but quiet
endurance of what he said and did. He pould not e^ en
J nture to kiss her brow tliis evening but jnst pressed her
hand to his lips, and left her. Tito felt that Rpniola was
a more unforgiving woman than he had imagined; her love
tas noVthat fweet'clinging instinct, stronger th^^^^^^^^^^^
ments which he began to see now, made the great cliaim
S a wife. Still th!s petrified coldness -^s be ter than a
passionate, futile opposition. Her pride and capabihty ot
?eeTn° where resistince was useless had their convenience
But when the door had closed on Tito, Romola lost the
look of cold immobility which came over her like an inevi-
table frost whenever he approached her. Inwardly she
was very far from being in a state of quiet endurance, and
fhe days that had passed since the scene which had divided
her f?om Tito, had been days of active plannmg and prep-
aration for the fulfillment of a purpose

The first thing she did now was to call old Maso to Uei.
-Maso" she said, in a decided tone, ''we take our
iour^ey to-morrow morning. We shall be able now. to
iv rS that first convoy of cloth, while they are wai ing
at San Piero. See about the two mules to-night, and be
?eady to set oa with them at break of day, and wait for

" Shi me?nir teke Maso with her as far as Bologna, and
then send him back with letters to her godfather and Tito^
tellins them that she was gone and never meant to return
She had planned her deplrture so that its secrecy might

:iiJ-4 ROMOLA.

be perfect, and her broken love and life be hidden away
unscanned by vulgar eyes. Bernardo del Xero had been
absent at his villa, willing to escape from political sus-
picions to his favorite occupation of attending to his land,
and she had paid him the debt without a personal inter-
view. He did not even know that the library was sold,
and was left to conjecture that some sudden piece of good
fortune had enabled Tito to raise this sum of money.
Maso had been taken into her confidence only so far that
he knew her intended journey was a secret; and to do just
what she told him was the thing he cared most for in his
withered wintry age.

Romola did not mean to go to bed that night. When
she had fastened the door she took her taper to the carved
and painted chest which contained her wedding clothes.
The white silk and gold lay there, the long white veil and the
circlet of j^earls. A great sob rose as she looked at them:
they seemed the shroud of her dead happiness. In a tiny
gold loop of the circlet a sugar-plum had lodged — a pink
hailstone from the shower of sweets; Tito had detected it
first, and had said that it should always remain there. At
certain moments — and this was one of them — Eomola was
carried, by a sudden wave of memory, back again into the
time of perfect trust, and felt again the presence of the
husband whose love made the world as fresh and wonder-
ful to her as to a little child that sits in stillness among the
sunny flowers: heard the gentle tones and saw the soft
eyes without any lie in them, and breathed again that
large freedom of the soul which comes from the faith tliat
the being who is nearest to us is greater than ourselves.
And in those brief moments the tears always rose: the
woman's lovingness felt • something akin to what the
bereaved mother feels when the tiny fingers seem to lie
warm on her bosom, and yet are marble to her li2:)s as she
bends over the silent bed.

But there was something else lying in the chest besides
the wedding clothes: it was something dark and coarse,
rolled up in a close bundle. She turned away her eyes
from the white and gold to the dark bundle, and as her
hands touched the serge, her tears began to be checked.
That coarse roughness recalled her fully to the present,
from which love and delight were gone. She unfastened
the thick white cord and spread the bundle out on the
table. It was the gray serge dress of a sister belonging to
the third order of St. Francis, living in the world but

AKlAD^i: DiacKOWNS HEiiSELF.

303

especially devoted to deeds of piety-a personage whom
5he Florentines were accustomed to call a Pmzocliera^
Romolawas going to in.t on this dress as a dis£^^^^^^^
she determined to put it on at once so that f s e neeciea
sleep before the morning, she might wake up m peitect
readiness to be gone. She put off her black garment,
md as he thruft her soft white arms into the harsh
tlecves of the serge mantle and felt the hard girdle of rope
u -1 J^^ fingers as she tied it, she courted those rude sen-
tions: they were in keeping with her new scorn of that
niino- called pleasure which made men base-that dextei-
ous contrivance for selfish ease, that shrinking fro
endurance and strain, when others were bowing beneath
burdens too heavy for them, which now made one image

" ThiTsheta^jfered her long hair together, diw it away
tight from her face, bound it m a great hard knot ^t the
back of her head, and taking a square piece of black silk,
tfed it in the fashion of a kerchief close across her head
and under her chin; and over that she drew the cowh bhe
S ed the candle to'the mirror. Surely her disguise wovild
be complete to any one who had not ived very near to he .
To herself she looked strangely like her brother Dmo: the
full oval of the cheek had only to be wasted; the ep.
already sad, had only to become a little sunke.. Was he
getting more like him in anything else? Only m t ns
thatshe understood now how men could be prompted to
■ sh awav forever from earthly delights, how they could
brprompted to dwell on images of sorrow rather than of

'"Sut'she Td not linger at the mirror: she set about
collecting and packing^all the relics of -|; f^^^-^J^
mother that were too large to be carried m hei smali
travelin-wallet. They were all to be put into the chest
dono with her wedding-clothes, and the chest was to be
commuted to her godfather when she was safely gone
"fZTL laid in the^portraits; then one by o- every li to
thino- that had a sacred memory clinging to it was put into

'^SlittsS.'^^ Thei^ tfsiill something else to be stripped
away Ci her, belonging to that past on wnch^she wa.
going to turn her back forever. She put her thmnb and
her forefinger to her betrothal ring; bu hey rested theie
without driving it off. Romola's mind had ^een ru^mg
with an impetuous current toward this act, foi winch slie

304 ROMOLA.

was preparing: tlie act of quitting a husband who had
disappointed all her trust, the act of breaking an outward
tie that no longer represented the inward bond of love.
But that force of outward symbols by which our active life
is knit together so as to make an inexorable external
identity for us, not to be shaken by our wavering conscious-
ness, gave a strange effect to this simple movement toward
taking off her ring — a movement which was but a small
sequence of her energetic resolution. It brought a vague
but arresting sense that she was somehow violently rend-
ing her life in two: a presentiment that the strong impulse
which had seemed to exclude doubt and make her } ath
clear might after all be blindness, and that there was some-
thing in human bonds which must prevent them from
being broken with tlie breaking of illusions.

If that beloved Tito who had placed the betrothal ring
on her finger was not in any valid sense the same Tito
whom she had ceased to love, why should she return to
him the sign of their union, and not rather retain it as a
memorial? And this act, which came as a palpable demon-
stration of her own and his identity, had a power unex-
plained to herself, of shaking Romola. It is the way with
half the truth amidst which we live, that it only haunts
us and makes dull pulsations that are never born into
sound. But there was a ]iassionate voice speaking within
her that presently nullified all such muffled murmurs.

" It cannot be I I cannot be subject to him. He is false.
I shrink from him. I despise him! "

She snatched the ring from her finger and laid it on the
table against the jjen with which she meant to write.
Again she felt that there could be no law for her but the
law of her affections. That tenderness and keen fellow-
feeling for the near and the loved which are the main out-
growth of the affections, had made the religion of her life:
they had made her patient in spite of natural imjjetuosity;
they would have sufficed to make her heroic. But now all
that strength was gone, or, rather, it was converted into
the strength of repulsion. She had recoiled from Tito in
proportion to the energy of that young belief and love
which he had disappointed, of that life-long devotion to
her father against which he had committed an irredeema-
ble offense. And it seemed as if all motive had slipped
away from her, except tlie indignation and scorn that made
her tear herself asunder from him.

She was not acting after any precedent, or obeying any

^ AEIADXE DISCROWNS HERSELF. 305

adopted maxims. The grand severity of the stoical phi-
losojDhy in which her father had taken care to instruct her,
Avas familiar enough to her ears and lips, and its lofty
spirit had raised certain echoes within her; but she had
never used it, never needed it as a rule of life. She had
endured and forborne because she loved: maxims which
told her to feel less, and not to cling close lest the onward
course of great nature should jar her, had been as power-
less on her tenderness as they had been on her father's
yearning for just fame. She had appropriated no theories:
she had simply felt strong in the strength of affection, and
life without tliat energy came to her as an entirely new
problem.

She was going to solve the problem in a way that seemed
to her very simple. Her mind had never yet bowed to any
obligation apart from personal love and reverence; she had
no keen sense of any other human relations, and all she
had to obey now was the instinct to sever herself from the
man she loved no longer.

Yet the unswerving resolution was accompanied with
continually varying phases of anguish. And now that the
active preparation for her departure was almost finished,
she lingered: she deferred writing the irrevocable words
of parting from all her little world. The emotions
of the past weeks seemed to rush in again with cruel
hurry, and take possession even of her limbs. She was
going to write, and her hand fell. Bitter tears came now
at the delusion which had blighted her young years:
tears very different from the sob of remembered happiness
with which she had looked at the circlet of pearls and the
pink hailstone. And now she felt a tingling of shame at
the words of ignominy she had cast at Tito — ''Have you
robbed some one else who is not dead?'' To have had
such words wrung from her — to have uttered them to her
husband seemed a degradation of her whole life. Hard
speech between those who have loved is hideous in the
memory, like the sight of greatness and beauty sunk into
vice and rags.

The heart-cutting comparison of the present with the
past urged itself upon Romola till it even transformed
itself into wretched sensations: she seemed benumbed to
everything but inward throbbings, and began to feel the
need of some hard contact. She drew her hands tight
along the harsh, knotted cord that hung from her waist.
She started to her feet and seized tlie rough lid of the
20

BOG KOMOhA.

chest: there was nothing else to go in? Xo. She closed
the lid, pressing her hand upon the rough carving, and
locked it.

Then she remembered that she had still to complete her
equipment as a Pinzochera. The large leather purse or
scarsella, with small coin in it, had to be hung on the cord
at her waist (her florins and small jewels, presents from
her godfather and cousin Brigida, were safely fastened
within her serge mantle), and on the other side must hang
the rosary.

It did not occur to Eomola, as she hung that rosary by
her side, that something else besides the mere garb would
perhaps be necessary to enable her to pass as a Pinzochera,
and that her whole air and expression were as little as
possible like those of a sister whose eyelids were used to be
bent, and whose lijjs were used to move in silent iteration.
Her inexperience iirevented her from picturing distant
details, and it helped her proud courage in shutting out
any foreboding of danger and insult. She did not know
that any Florentine woman had ever done exactly what she
was going to do: unhappy wives often took refuge with
their friends, or in the cloister, she knew, but both those
courses were impossible to her; she had invented a lot for
herself — to go to the most learned woman in the world,
Cassandra Fedele, at Venice, and ask her how an instructed
woman could support herself in a lonely life there.

She was not daunted by the practical difficulties in the
way or the dark uncertainty at the end. Her life could
never be hapjiy any more, but it must not, could not, be
ignoble. And by a pathetic mixture of childish romance
with her woman's trials, the philosophy which had notliing
to do with this great decisive deed of hers had its place in
her imagination of the future: so far as she conceived her
solitary, loveless life at all, she saw it animated by a proud,
stoical heroism, and by an indistinct but strong purpose
of labor, that she might be wise enough to write something
which would rescue her father's name from oblivion.
After all, she was only a young girl — this poor Eomola,
who had found herself at the end of her joys.

Tliere were other things yet to be done. There was a
small key in a casket on the table — but now Eomola per-
ceived that her taper Avas dying out, and she had forgotten
to provide herself with any other light. In a few mo-
ments tlie room was in total darkness. Feeling her way
to the nearest chair, she sat down to wait for the morning.

ARIADNE DISCKOWNS HEKSELF. oO'r

Her purpose in seeking the key had called np certain
memories which had come back npon her during the past
week with the new vividness that remembered words
always have for ns when we have learned to give them a
new 'meaning. Since the shock of the revelation which
had seemed to divide her forever from Tito, that last inter-
view with Dino had never been for many hours together
out of her mind. And it solicited her all the more,
because while its remembered images pressed upon her
almost with the imperious force of sensations, they raised
struggling thoughts which resisted their influence. She
could not°prevent herself from hearing inwardly the dying
prophetic voice saying again and again— ''The man whose
face was a blank loosed thy hand and departed ; and as he
Avent, I could see his face, and it was the face of the
^reat Tempter — — . And thou, Romola, didst wring thy

hands and seek for water, and there was none and

the plain was bare and stony again, and thou wast alone in
the midst of it. And then it seemed that the night fell,
and I saw no more.'*' She could not prevent herself from
dwelling with a sort of agonized fascination on the wasted
face; on the straining gaze at the crucifix; on the awe
Avhich had compelled her to kneel; on the last broken
words and then the unbroken silence — on all the details
of the death-scene, which had seemed like a sudden
opening into a world apart from that of her life-long
knowledge.

But her mind was roused to resistance of impressions
that, from being obvious phantoms, seemed to be getting
solid in the davlight. As a strong body struggles against
fumes with the more violence when they begin to be
stifling, a strong soul struggles against jDhantasies with all
the more alarmed energy wlien they threaten -to govern in
the place of thought.

What had the words of that vision to do with her real
sorrows? That fitting of certain words was a mere
chance; the rest was all vague — nay, those words them-
selves were vague; they were determined by nothing but
her brother's memories and beliefs. He believed there
was something fatal in pagan learning; he believed that
celibacy was more holv than marriage; he remembered
their home, and all the objects in the library; and of
these threads the vision was woven. What reasonable
warrant could she have had for believing in such a vision
and acting on it? Xone. True as the voice of foreboding

308 ROMOLAi

had proved, Romola saw with unshaken conviction that to
have renounced Tito in obedience to a warning like that,
would have been meagre-hearted folly. Her trust had been
delusive, but she would have chosen over again to have
acted on it rather than be a creature led by phantoms and
disjointed whispers in a world where there was the large
music of reasonable speech, and the warm gv&s]) of living
hands.

" But the persistent presence of these memories, linking
themselves in her imagination with her actual lot, gave her
a glimpse of understanding into the lives which had before
lain utterly aloof from her sympathy — the lives of the men
and women who were led by such inward images and voices.

" If they were only a little stronger in me," she said to
herself, ''I should lose the sense of what that vision really
was, and take it for a prophetic light. I might in time
get to be a seer of visions myself, like the Suora Madda-
lena, and Camilla Eucellai, and the rest."

Romola shuddered at the possibility. All the instruction,
all the main influences of her life had gone to fortify her
scorn of that sickly superstition which led men and women,
with eyes too weak for the daylight, to sit in dark swamps
and try to read human destiny by the chance flame of
wandering vapors.

And yet she was conscious of something deeper than
that coincidence of words which made the parting contact
with her dying brother live anew in her mind, and gave a
new sisterhood to the wasted face. If there were much
more of such experience as his in the world, she would
like to understand it — would even like to learn the thoughts
of men who sank in ecstacy before the pictured agonies of
martyrdom. There seemed to be something more than
madness in the supreme fellowship with suffering. The
springs were all dried up around her; she wondered what
other waters there were at which men drank and found
strength in the desert. And those moments in tlie Duomo
when she had sobbed with a mysterious mingling of rapture
and pain, while Fra Girolamo offered himself a willing
sacrifice for the people, came back to her as if the}' had
been a transient taste of some such far-off fountain. But
again she shrank from impressions that were alluring her
Avithin the sphere of visions and narrow fears which com-
pelled men to outrage natural affections as Dino had done.

This was the tangled web that Romola had in her mind
as she sat weary in the darkness. No radiant angel came

THE TABERNACLE UNLOCKED. 309

across the gloom with a clear messao-e for her. In those
times, as uow, there were human beings who never saw
angels or heard perfectly clear messages. Such truth as
came to them was brought confusedly in the voices and
deeds of men not at all like the seraphs of unfailing wing
and piercing vision — men who believed falsities as well as
truths, and did the wrong as well as the right. The help-
ing hands stretched out to them were the hands of men
who stumbled and often saw dimly, so that these beings
unvisited by angels had no other choice than to grasp that
stumbling guidance along the path of reliance and action
which is the path of life, or else to pause in loneliness and
disbelief, which is no path, but the arrest of inaction and
death.

And so Romola, seeing no ray across the darkness, and
heavy with conflict that changed nothing, sank at last to
sleep.

CHAPTER XXXVII.

THE TABERNACLE UNLOCKED.

Romola was waked by a tap at the door. The cold
light of early morning was in the room, and Maso was
come for the traveling v/allet. The old man could not
help starting when she opened the door, and showed him,
instead of the graceful outline he had been used to,
crowned with the brightness of her hair, the thick folds
of the gray mantle and the pale face shadowed by the
dark cowl.

" It is well, Maso," said Romola, trying to speak in the
calmest voice, and make the old man easy. " Here is the
wallet quite ready. You will go on quietly, and I shall
not be far behind you. When you get out of the gates
you may go more slowly, for I shall perhaps join yon
before you get to Trespiano."

She closed the door behind him, and then put her hand
on the key which she had taken from the casket the last
thing in the night. It was the original key of the little
painted tabernacle: Tito had forgotten to drown it in the
Arno, and it had lodged, as such small things will, in the
corner of the embroidered scarsella which he wore with
the purple tunic. One day, long after their marriage.

310 KOMOLA.

Komola had found it there, and had put it by, without
using it, but with a sense of satisfaction that tlie key was
within reach. The cabinet on which the tabernacle stood
had been moved to the side of the room, close to one of
the windows, where the pale morning light fell upon it so
as to make the painted forms discernible enough to Eomola,
Avlio knew them well, — the triumj)hant Bacchus, with his
clusters and his vine-clad spear, clasping the crowned
Ariadne; tlie Loves showering roses, the wreathed vessel,
the cunniug-eyed dolphins, and the rippled sea: all encir-
cled by a flowery border, like a bower of paradise. Romola
looked at the familiar images with new bitterness and
repulsion: they seemed a more pitiable mockery than ever
on this chill morning, when she had waked up to wander
in loneliness. They had been no tomb of sorrow, but a
lying screen. Foolish Ariadne! with her gaze of love, as
if that bright face, with its hyacinthe curls like tendrils
among the vines, held the deep secret of her life!

" Ariadne is wonderfully transformed," thought Romola.
"She would look strange among the vines and the roses
now."

She took up the mirror, and looked at herself once
more. But the sight was so startling in this morning
light that she laid it down again, with a. sense of shrink-
ing almost as strong as that with which she had turned
from the joyous Ariadne. The recognition of her own
face, with the cowl about it, brought back the dread lest
she should be drawn at last into fellowship with some
wretched superstition — into the company of the howling
fanatics and weeping nuns who had been her contempt
from childhood till now. She thrust the key into the
tal)ernacle hurriedly: hurriedly she opened it, and took
out the crucifix, without looking at it; then, with trem-
bling fingers, she passed a cord through the little ring,
hung tlie crucifix round her neck, and hid it in the bosom
of her mantle. ''For Dino's sake," she said to herself.

Still there were the letters to be written which Maso was
to carry back from Bologna. They were very brief. The
first said —

"Tito, my love for you is dead; and therefore, so far as
I was yours, I too am dead. Do not try to put in force
any laws for the sake of fetching me back: that would
bring you no happiness. The Romola you married can
never return. I need explain nothing to you after the
words I uttered to you the last time we spoke long together.

THE TABERXACLE UXLOCKED. 311

If you supposed them to be words of transient anger, you
will know now that they were the sign of an irreversible
change,

" I think you will fulfill my wish that my bridal chest
should be sent to my godfather, who gave it me. It con-
tains my wedding-clothes and the portraits and other relics
of my father and mother."

She folded the ring inside this letter, and wrote Tito's
name outside. The next letter was to Bernardo del
Nero: —

Deakest Godfather, — If I could have been any good to your life
by staying I would not liave gone away to a distance. But now I am
gone. Do not ask the reason; and if you love my father, try to pre-
vent any one from seeking me. I could not bear my life at Florence.
I cannot bear to tell any one why. Help to cover my lot in silence.
I have asked that my bridal chest'should be sent to you: when you
open it, you wall know the reason. Please to give all the things that
were my mother's to my cousin Brigida, and ask her to forgive me
for not saying any words of parting to her.

Farewell, my second father. The best thing I have in life is still
to remember your goodness and be gi-ateful to you. Romola.

Eomola put the letters, along with the crucifix, within
the bosom of her mantle, and then felt that everything
was done. She was ready now to depart.

No one was stirring in the house, and she went almost
as quietly as a gray phantom down the stairs and into the
silent street. Her heart was palpitating violently, yet she
enjoyed the sense of her firm tread on tlae broad flags— -of
the swift movement which was like a chained-up resolution
set free at last. The anxiety to carry out her act, and the
dread of any obstacle, averted sorrow; and as "she reached
the Ponte Rubaconte, she felt less that Santa Croce was in
ber sight than that the yellow streak of morning which
parted the gray was getting broader and broader, and that,
unless she hastened her steps, she should have to encounter
faces.

Her simplest road was to go right on to the Borgo Pinti,
and then along by the walls to the Porta San Gallo, from
which she must leave the city, and this road carried her
by the Piazza di Santa Croce. But she walked as steadily
and rapidly as ever through the piazza, not trusting her-
self to look toward the church. The thought that any
eyes might be turned on her Avith a look of eurio.sity and
recognition, and that indifferent uiinds might be set
speculating on her private sorrows, made Komola shrink

dVi BOMOLA.

physically as from the imagination of torture. She felt
degraded even by that act of her husband from which she
was helplessly suffering. But there was no sign that any
eyes looked forth from windows to notice this tall gray
sister, with the firm step, and proud attitude of the
cowled head. Her road lay aloof from the stir of early
traffic, and when she reached the Porta San Gallo, it was
easy to pass while a dispute was going forward about the
toll for panniers of eggs and market produce which were
just entering.

Out! Once past the houses of the Borgo, she would be
Ijeyond the last fringe of Florence, the sky would be broad
above her, and she would have entered on her new life —
a life of loneliness and endurance, but of freedom. She
had been strong enough to snap asunder the bonds she
had accepted in blind faith : whatever befell her, she
would no more feel the breath of soft hated lips warm
upon her cheek, no longer feel the breath of an odious
mind stifling her own. The bare wintry morning, the
chill air, were welcome in their severity: the leafless trees,
the sombre hills, were not haunted by the gods of beauty
and joy, whose worship she had forsaken forever.

But presently the light burst forth with sudden strength,
and shadows were thrown across the road. It seemed that
the sun was going to chase away the grayness. The light
is perhaps never felt more strongly as a divine presence
stirring all those inarticulate sensibilities which are our
deepest life, than m these moments when it instantaneously
awakens the shadows. A certain awe which inevitably
accompanied this most momentous act of her life became
a more conscious element in Komola's feeling as she found
herself in the sudden presence of the impalpable golden
glory and the long shadow of herself that was not to be
escaped. Hitherto she had met no one but an occasional
contadino with mules, and the many turnings of the road
on the level prevented her from seeing that Maso was not
very far ahead of her. But Avhen she had passed Pietra
and was on rising ground, she lifted up the hanging roof
of her cowl and looked eagerly before her.

The cowl was dropped again immediately. She had
seen, not Maso, but — two monks, who were approaching
within a few yards of her. The edge of her cowl making
a pent-house on her brow had shut out the objects above
the level of her eyes, and for the last few moments she
had been looking at nothing but the brightness on the

THE BT.ACK MARKS BECOME MAGICAL. 313

path and at her own shadow, tall and shrouded like a
dread spectre.

She wished now that she had not looked up. Her
disguise made her especially dislike to encounter monks:
they might expect some pious passwords of which she knew
nothing, and she walked along with a careful appearance
of unconsciousness till she had seen the skirts of the black
mantles pass by her. The encounter had made her heart
beat disagreeably, for Romola had an uneasiness in her
religious disguise, a shame at this studied concealment,
which was made more distinct by a special effort to appear
unconscious under actual glances.

But the black skirts would be gone the faster because
they were going down-hill; and seeing a great flat stone
against a cypress that rose from a projecting green bank,
she yielded to the desire which the slight shock had given
her," to sit down and rest.

She turned her back on Florence, not meaning to look
at it till the monks were quite out of sight; and raising
the edge of her cowl again when she had seated herself, she
discerned Maso and the mules at a distance where it was
not hopeless for her to overtake them, as the old man
would probably linger in expectation of her.

Meanwhile she might pause a little. She was free and
alone.

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

THE BLACK MAEKS BECOME MAGICAL.

That journey of Tito's to Rome, which had removed
many difficulties from Romola's departure, had been re-
solved on quite suddenly, at a supper, only the evening
before.

Tito had set out toward that supper with agreeable
expectations. The meats were likely to be delicate, the
wines choice, the company distinguished; for the place of
entertainment was the Selva or Orto de Rucellai, or, as we
should say, the Rucellai Gardens; and the host, Bernardo
Rucellai, was quite a typical Florentine grandee. Even
his family name has a significance which is prettily sym-
bolic: properly understood, it may bring before us a little
lichen, popularlv named orcdJa or rorcella, which grows on

314 ROMOLA.

the rocks of Greek isles and in the Canaries; and having
drunk a great deal of light into its little stems and button-
heads, will, under certain circumstances, give it out again
as a reddish purple dye, very grateful to tlie eyes of men.
By bringing the excellent secret of this dye, called oriceUo,
from the Levant to Florence, a certain merchant, who
lived nearly a hundred years before our Bernardo's time,
won for himself and his descendants much wealtli, and the
IDleusantly-suggestive surname of Oricellari, or Eoccellari,
which on Tuscan tongues speedily became Rucellai.

And our Bernardo, who stands out more prominently
than the rest on this purple background, had added all
sorts of distinction to the family name: he had married
the sister of Lorenzo de Medici, and had had the most
splendid wedding in the memory of Florentine upholstery;
and for these and other virtues he had been sent on
embassies to France and Venice, and had been chosen
Gonfaloniere; he had not only built himself a fine palace,
but had finished putting the black and white marble facade
to the church of Santa Maria Novella; he had planted a
garden with rare trees, and had made it classic ground
by receiving within it the meetings of the Platonic Acad-
emy, orphaned by the death of Lorenzo; he had Avritten an
excellent, learned book, of a new topographical sort, about
ancient Rome; he had collected antiquities; he had a pure
Latinity. The sinijilest account of liim, one sees, reads
like a laudatory epitaph, at the end of which the Greek
and Ausonian Muses miglit be confidently requested to
tear their luiir, and Nature to desist from any second
attempt to combine so many virtues with one set of viscera.

His invitation had been conveyed to Tito through
Lorenzo Toniabuoni, with an emphasis which would have
suggested that the object of the gathering was political,
even if the public questions of the time had been less
absorbing. As it was, Tito felt sure that some party pur-
poses were to be furthered by the excellent flavors of stewed
fish and old Greek wine; for Bernardo Rucellai was not
simply an influential personage, he was one of the elect
Twenty who for three weeks had held the reigns of Flor-
ence, This assurance put Tito in the best spirits as he
made his way to the Via dclla Scala, wliere the classic gar-
den was to be found: without it, he might have had some
uneasy speculation as to whether the high company he
would have the honor of meeting was likely to be dull as
well as distinguished: for he had had experience of various

THE BLACK MARKS BECOME MAGICAL. 315

dull suppers even in the Rucellai gardens, and especially
of the dull pliilosophic sort, ^y]K'rein he had not only been
calk'd upon to accept an entii-e scheme of the universe
(which would have been easy to him), but to listen to an
exposition of the same, from the origin of things to thdir
complete ripeness in the tractate of the philosopher then
speaking.

It was a dark evening, and it was only when Tito
crossed the occasional light of a lamp suspended before
an image of the Virgin, that the outline of his figure was
discernible enough for recognition. At such moments
any one caring to watch his passage from one of these
lights to another might have observed that the tall and
graceful personage with the mantle folded round him was
followed constantly by a very different form, thick-set
and elderly, in a serge tunic and felt hat. The conjunc-
tion might have been taken for mere chance, since
there were many passengers along the streets at this hour.
But when Tito stopped at the gate of the Rucellai gardens,
the figure behind stopped too. The sportello, or smaller door
of the gate was already being held open by the servant, who,
in the distraction of attending to some question, had not
yet closed it since the last arrival, and Tito turned in
rapidly, giving his name to the servant, and passing on
between the evergreen bushes that shone like metal m the
torchlight. The follower turned in too.

"Your name?" said the servant.

'' Baldassarre Calvo," was the immediate answer.

" You are not a guest; the guests have all passed,^'

" I belong to Tito Melema, who has just gone in. I am
to wait in the gardens."

The servant hesitated. ''I had orders to admit only
guests. Are you a servant of Messer Tito?"

" jSTo, friend, I am not a servant; I am a scholar."

There are men to whom you need only say, "I am a
buffalo," in a certain tone of quiet confidence, and they
will let you pass. The porter gave way at once, Bal-
dassarre entered, and heard the door closed and chained
behind him, as he too disappeared among the shining-
bushes.

Those ready and firm answers argued a great change in
Baldassarre since the last meeting face to face with Tito,
when the dagger broke in two. The change had declared
itself in a startling way.

At the moment when the shadow of Tito passed in front

316 ROMOLA,

of the hovel as he dej)arted homeward, Baldassarre was
sitting in that state of after-tremor known to every one
who is liable to great outbursts of passion: a state in which
physical powerlessness is sometimes accompanied by an
exce])tional lucidity of thought, as if that disengagement
of excited passion had carried away a fire-mist and left
clearness behind it. He felt unable to rise and walk away
just yet; his limbs seemed benumbed; he was cold, and
his hands shook. But in that bodily heljjlessness he sat
surrounded, not by the habitual dimness and vanishing
shadows, but by the clear images of the past; he was living
again in an unbroken course through that life Avhich
seemed a long preparation for the taste of bitterness.

For some minutes he was too thoroughly absorbed by
the images to reflect on the fact that he saw them, and
note the fact as a change. But when that sudden clear-
ness had traveled through the distance, and came at last
to rest on the scene just gone by, he felt fully where he
was: he remembered Monna Lisa and Tessa. Ah! he then
was the mysterious husband; he who had another wife in
the Via de Bardi. It was time to pick up the broken dag-
ger and go — go and leave no trace of himself; for to hide
his feebleness seemed the thing most like power that was
left to him. He leaned to take up the fragments of the
dagger; then he turned toward the book which lay open
at his side. It was a fine large manuscript, an odd volume
of Pausanias. The moonlight was upon it, and he could
see the large letters at the head of the page:

MESSHNIKA. KB'.

In old days he had known Pausanias familiarly; yet an
hour or two ago he had been looking hopelessly at that
page, and it had suggested no more meaning to him than
if the letters had been black weather-marks on a wall; but
at this moment they were once more the magic signs that
conjure up a world. That moonbeam falling on the letters
had raised Messenia before him, and its struggle against
the Spartan oppression.

He snatched up the book, but the light was too pale for
him to read further by. No matter: he knew that chap-
ter; he read inwardly. He saw the stoning of the traitor
Aristocrates — stoned by a whole people, who cast him out
from their borders to lie unbnried, and set up a pillar with
verses upon it telling how Time liad brought home justice
to tlie unjust. The words arose within him, and stirred

THE BLACK MAKES BECOME MAGICAL. 317

innumerable vibrations of memory. He forgot that he
was old: he could almost have shouted. The light was
come again, mother of knowledge and joy! In that exul-
tation his limbs recovered their strength: he started up
with his broken dagger and book, and went out under
the broad moonlight.

It was a nipping frosty air, but Baldassarre could feel no
chill — he only felt the glow of conscious power. He walked
about and paused on all the open spots of that high ground,
and looked down on the domed and towered city, sleeping
darkly under its sleeping guardians, the mountains; on
the pale gleam of the river; on the valley vanishing toward
the peaks of snow; and felt himself master of them all.

That sense of mental empire which belongs to us all in
moments of exceptional clearness was intensified for him
by the long days and nights in which memory had been
little more than the consciousness of something gone.
That city, which had been a weary labyrinth, was material
that he could subdue to his purposes now: his mind
glanced through its affairs with flashing conjecture; he
was once more a man who knew cities, whose sense of
vision was instructed with large experience, and who felt
the keen delight of holding all things in the grasp of
language. Names! Images! — his mind rushed through
its wealth without pausing, like one who enters on a great
inheritance.

But amidst all that rushing eagerness there was one
End presiding in Baldassarre's consciousness, — a dark
deity in the inmost cell, who only seemed forgotten while his
hecatomb was being prepared. And when the first triumph
in the certainty of recovered power had had its way,
his thoughts centered themselves on Tito. That fair slip-
pery viper could not escape him now; thanks to struggling
justice, the heart that never quivered with tenderness for
another had its sensitive selfish fibres that could be reached
by the sharp point of anguish. The soul that bowed to no
right, bowed to the great lord of mortals, Pain.

He could search into every secret of Tito's life now: he
knew some of the secrets already, and the failure of the
broken dagger, which seemed like frustration, had been
the beginning of achievement. Doubtless that sudden rage
had shaken away the obstruction which stified his soul.
Twice before, when his memory had partially returned, it
had been in consequence of sudden excitation: once when
he had to defend himself from an enraged dog: once when

318 ROMOLA.

he had been overtaken by the waves, and had had to
scramble up a rock to save himself.

Yes, but if this time, as then, the light were to die out,
and the dreary conscious blank come back again! This
time the light was stronger and steadier; but what security
was there that before the morrow the dark fog would not
be round him again? Even the fear seemed like the begin-
ning of feebleness: he thought with alarm that he miglit
sink the faster for this excited vigil of his on the hill,
which was exjoending his force; and after seeking anxiously
for a sheltered corner where he might lie down, he nestled
at last against a heap of warm garden straw, and so fell
asleep.

When he opened his eyes again it was daylight. The
first moments were filled with strange bewilderment: he
was a man with a double identity: to which had he awaked?
to the life of dim-sighted sensibilities like the sad heirship
of some fallen greatness, or to the life of recovered power?
Surely the last, for the events of the night all came back
to him: the recognition of the page in Pausanias, the
crowding resurgence of facts and names, the sudden wide
prospect which had given him such a moment as that of
the Ma3nad in the glorious amaze of her morning waking
on the mountain top.

He took up tlie book again, he read, he remembered
without reading. He saw a name, and the images of
deeds rose with it: he saw the mention of a deed, and he
linked it with a name. There were stories of inexj)iable
crimes, but stories also of guilt that seemed successful.
There were sanctuaries for swift-footed miscreants: base-
ness had its armor, and the weapons of justice sometimes
broke against it. What then? If baseness triumphed
everyAvhere else, if it could heap to itself all the goods of
the world and even hold the keys of hell, it would never
triumph over the hatred which it had itself awakened.
It could devise no torture that would seem greater tlian
the torture of submitting to its smile. Baldassarre felt
the indestructible independent force of a supreme emotion,
which knows no terror, and asks for no motive, which is
itself an ever-burning motive, consuming all other desire.
And now in this morning light, when the assurance came
again that the fine fibres of association were active still,
and that his recovered self had not departed, all his glad-
ness was but the hope of vengeance.

From that time till the evening on which we have seen

THE BI.At'K MARKS BECOME MAGICAL. 319

him euter the Rucellai gardens, he had been incessantly,
but cautiously, inquiring into Tito's position and all his cir-
cumstances, and there was hardly a day on which he did
not contrive to follow his movements. But he wished not
to arouse any alarm in Tito : he wished to secure a moment
when the hated favorite of blind fortune was at the sum-
mit of confident ease, surrounded by chief men on whose
favor he depended. It was not any retributive payment
or recognition of himself for his own behoof, on which
Baldassarre's whole soul was bent: it was to find the
sharpest edge of disgrace and shame by which a selfish
smiler could be pierced; it was to send through his mar-
row the most sudden shock of dread. He was content to
lie hard, and live stintedly — he had spent the greater part
of his remaining money in buying another poniard: his
hunger and his thirst were after nothing exquisite but an
exquisite vengeance. He had avoided addressing himself
to any one whom he suspected of intimacy with Tito, lest
an alarm raised in Tito's mind should urge him either to
flight or to some other counteracting measure which hard-
pressed ingenuity might devise. For this reason he had
never entered Nello's shop, which he observed that Tito
frequented, and he had turned aside to avoid meeting
Piero di Cosimo.

The possibility of frustration gave added eagerness to
his desire that the great opportunity he sought should not
be deferred. The desire was eager in him on another
ground; he trembled lest his memory should go again.
Whether from the agitating presence of that fear, or from
some other causes, he had twice felt a sort of mental dizzi-
ness, in which the inward sense or imagination seemed to
be losing the distinct forms of things. Once he had
attempted to enter the Palazzo Vecchio and make his way
into a council-chamber where Tito was, and had failed.
But now, on this evening, he felt that his occasion was
come.

;>20 BOMOLA.

CHAPTER XXXIX.

A SUPPER IN THE KUCELLAI GARDEN'S.

On entering the handsome pavilion, Tito's quick glance
soon discerned in the selection of the guests the confirma-
tion of his conjecture that the object of the gathering was
political, though, perhaps, nothing more distinct than that
strengthening of party which comes from good-fellowship.
Good dishes and good wine were at that time believed to
heighten the consciousness of political preferences, and in
the inspired ease of after-supper talk it was supposed that
people ascertained their own opinions with a clearness quite
inaccessible to uninvited stomachs. The Florentines were
a sober and frugal people; but wherever men have gath-
ered wealth, Madonna della Gozzoviglia and San Buonvino
have had their worshipers; and the Rucellai were among
the few Florentine families who kept a great table and
lived splendidly. It was not probable that on this evening
there would be any attempt to apply high philosophic the-
ories; and there could be no objection to the bust of Plato
looking on, or even to the modest presence of the cardinal
virtues in fresco on the walls.

That bust of Plato had been long used to look down on
conviviality of a more transcendental sort, for it had been
brought from Lorenzo's villa after his death, when the
meetings of the Platonic Academy had been transferred
to these gardens. Especially on every thirteenth of No-
vember, reputed anniversary of Plato's death, it had looked
down from under laurel leaves on a picked company of
scholars and philosophers, who met to eat and drink with
moderation, and to discuss and admire, perhaps with less
moderation, the doctrines of the great master: — on Pico
della Mirandola, once a Quixotic young genius with long
curls, astonished at his own powers and astonishing Rome
with heterodox theses; afterward a more humble student
with a consuming passion for inward perfection, having
come to find the universe more astonishing than his own
cleverness: — on innocent, laborious Marsilio Ficino, picked
out young to be reared as a Platonic philosopher, and fed
on Platonism, in all its stages, till his mind was perhaps a
little pulpy from that too exclusive diet:— on Angelo Pol-
iziano, chief literary genius of that age, a born poet, and
a scholar without dullness, whose phrases had blood in

A SUPPER IN THE RUCJELLAI GAKDEN8. '621

them and are alive still : — or, further back, on Leon Bat-
tista Alberti, a reverend senior when those three were
young, and of a much grander type than they, a robust,
universal mind, at once practical and theoretic, artist, man
of science, inventor, poet: — and on many more valiant
workers, whose names are not registered where every day
we turn the leaf to read them, but whose labors make a
part, though an unrecognized part, of our inheritance, like
the plowing and sowing of past generations.

Bernardo Eucellai was a man to hold a distinguished
place in that Academy even before he became its host and
patron. He was still in the prime of life, not more than
four and forty, with a somewhat haughty, cautiously dig-
nified presence; conscious of an amazingly pure Latinity,
but, says Erasmus, not to be caught speaking Latin — no
word of Latin to be sheared off him by the sharpest of
Teutons. He welcomed Tito with more marked favor than
usual and gave him a place between Lorenzo Tornabuoni
and Giannozzi Pucci, both of them accomplished young
members of the Medicean party.

Of course the talk was the lightest in the world while
the brass bowl filled with scented water was passing round,
that the company might wash their hands, and rings
flashed on white fingers under the wax-lights, and there
was the pleasant fragrance of fresh white damask newly
come from France. The tone of remark was a very
common one in those times. Some one asked what Dante's
pattern old Florentine would think if the life could come
into him again under his leathern belt and bone clasp, and
he could see silver forks on the table? And it was agreed
on all hands that the habits of posterity would be very
surprising to ancestors, if ancestors could only know them.

And while the silver forks were just dallying with the
appetizing delicacies that introduced the more serious
business of the supper — such as morsels of liver, cooked to
that exquisite point that they would melt in the mouth —
there was time to admire the designs on the enameled
silver centres of the brass service, and to say something, as
usual, about the silver dish or confetti, a masterpiece of
Antonio Pollajuolo, whom patronizing Popes had seduced
from his native Florence to more gorgeous Rome.

*'Ah, I remember," said Niccolo Ridolfi, a middle-aged
man, with that negligent ease of manner which, seeming
to claim nothing, is really based on the life-long conscious-
ness of commanding rank — " I remember our Antonio
21

o22 llOMOLA*

getting bitter about his chiseling and enameling of these
metal things, and taking in a fury to painting, because,
said he, ' the artist who puts his work into gold and silver
puts his brains into the melting-pot.'"

"And that is not unlikely to be a true foreboding of
Antonio%" said Giannozzo Pucci. " If this pretty war
with Pisa goes on, and the revolt only spreads a little to
our other towns, it is not only our silver dishes that are
likely to go; I doubt whether Antonio's silver saints round
the altar of San Giovanni will not some day vanish from
the eyes of the faithful to be worshipped more devoutly in
the form of coin."

"The Frate is preparing us for that already," said Tor-
nabuoni. " He is telling the people that God will not
have silver crucifixes and starving stomachs; and that the
church is best adorned with the gems of holiness and the
fine gold of brotherly love."

" A very useful doctrine of war-finance, as many a
Condottiere has found," said Bernardo Eucellai, drily,
" But politics come on after the confetti, Lorenzo, when
we can drink wine enough to wash them down; they are
too solid to be taken with roast and boiled."

"Yes, indeed," said Niccolo Ridolfi. "Our Luigi Pulci
would have said this delicate boiled kid must be eaten with
an impartial mind. I remember one day at Careggi, when
Luigi was in his rattling vein, he was maintaining that
nothing perverted the palate like opinion. ' Opinion,' said
he, 'corrupts the saliva — that's why men took to pepper.
Skepticism is the only philosophy that doesn't bring a taste
in the mouth.' 'Nay,' says poor Lorenzo de Medici, 'you
must be out there, Luigi. Here is this untainted skeptic,
Matteo Franco, who wants hotter sauce than any of us.'
' Because he has a strong opinion of himself,' flashes out
Luigi, 'which is the original egg of all other opinion. He
a skeptic? He believes in the immortality of his own
verses. He is such a logician as that preaching friar who
described the pavement of the bottomless pit.' Poor
Luigi! his mind Avas like sharj^est steel that can touch
nothing without cutting.-"

" And yet a- very gentle-hearted creature," said Gian-
nozzo Pucci. " It seemed to me his talk was a mere
blowing of soap-bubbles. What dithyrambs he went into
about eating and drinking! and yet he was as temperate as
a butterfly."

The liglit talk and the solid eatables M-ere not soon at ail

A SUPPER IN THE RUCELLAI GARDENS. 323

end, for after the roast and boiled meats came the indis-
pensable capon and game, and, crowning glory of a well-
spread table, a peacock cooked according to the receipt of
Apicus for cooking partridges, namely, with the feathers
on, but not plucked afterward, as that great authority
ordered concerning his partridges; on the contrary, so dis-
posed on the dish that it might look as much as possible
like a live peacock taking its unboiled repose. Great was
the skill required in that confidential servant who was the
official carver, respectfully to turn the classical though
insipid bird on its back, and expose the plucked breast
from which lie was to dispense a delicate slice to each of
the honorable company, unless any one should be of so
independent a mind as to decline that expensive toughness
and prefer the vulgar digestibility of capon.

Hardly any one was so bold. Tito quoted Horace and
dispersed his slice in small particles over his plate; Ber-
nardo Rucellai made a learned observation about the
ancient price of peacocks' eggs, but did not pretend to eat
his slice; and Niccolo Eidolfi held a mouthful on his fork
while he told a favorite story of Luigi Pulci's, about a man
of Siena, who, wanting to give a splendid entertainment at
moderate expense, bought a wild goose, cut off its beak and
webbed feet, and boiled it in its feathers, to pass for a
pea-hen.

In fact, very little peacock was eaten; but there was the
satisfaction of sitting at a table where peacock was served
up in a remarkable manner, and of knowing that such
caprices were not within reach of any but those who supped
with the very wealthiest men. And it would have been
rashness to speak slightingly of peacock's flesh, or any
other venerable institution, at a time when Fra Girolamo
was teaching the disturbing doctrine that it was not the
duty of the rich to be luxurious for the sake of the poor.
Meanwhile, in the chill obscurity that surrounded this
centre of warmth, and light, and savory odors, the lonely
disowned man was walking in gradually narrowing cir-
cuits. He paused among the trees, and looked m at the
windows, which made brilliant pictures against the gloom.
He could hear the laughter; he could see Tito gesticulat-
ing with careless grace, and hear his voice, now alone, now
mingling in the merry confusion of interlacing speeches.
Baldassarre's mind was highly strung. He was preparing
liimself for the moment when he could win his entrance
into this brilliant company; and he had a savage satisfac-

324 ROMOLA.

tion in the sight of Tito's easy gayety, which seemed to be
preparing the unconscious victim for more effective torture.

But the men seated among the branching tapers and the
flashing cups could know nothing of the pale fierce face
that watched them from without. The light can be a cur-
tain as well as the darkness.

And the talk went on with more eagerness as it became
less disconnected and trivial. The sense of citizenship was
just then strongly forced even on the most indifferent
minds. What the overmastering Era Girolamo was saying
and prompting was really uppermost in the tlioughts of
every one at table; and before the stewed fish was removed,
and while the favorite sweets were yet to come, his name
rose to the surface of the conversation, and, in spite of
Eucellai's previous prohibition, the talk again became
political. At first, while the servants remained present,
it was mere gossip: what had been done in the Palazzo on
the first day's voting for the Great Council; how hot-tem-
pered and domineering Francesco Valori was, as if he were
to have everything his own way by right of his austere
virtue; and how it was clear to everybody who heard Sode-
rini's speeches in favor of the Great Council and also heard
the Frate's sermons, that they were both kneaded in the
same trough.

"My opinion is," said Niccolo Ridolfi, "that the Frate
has a longer head for public matters than Soderini or any
Piagnone among them: you may depend on it that Sode-
rini is his mouthpiece more than he is Soderini's."

"No, Niccolo; there I differ from you," said Bernardo
Rucellai: "the Frate has an acute mind, and readily sees
what will serve his own ends; but it is not likely that
Pagolantoiiio Soderini, who has had long experience of
affairs, and has specially studied the Venetian Council,
should be much indebted to a monk for ideas on that sub-
ject. No, no; Soderini loads the cannon; though, I grant
you, Fra Girolamo brings the powder and lights the match.
He is master of the people, and the people are getting
master of us. Eccol"

"Well," said Lorenzo Tornabuoni, presently, when the
room was clear of servants, and nothing but wine was
passing round, "whether Soderini is indebted or not, we
are indebted to the Frate for the general amnesty which
has gone along with the scheme of the Council. W^e
might have done without the foar of ({od and tlie reform
of morals being passed by a majority of black beans; but

A SUPPER IX THE RUCELLAI GARDENS. 325

that excellent proposition, that our Meclicean heads should
be allowed to remain comfortably on our shoulders, and
tiiat we should not be obliged to"^hand over our property
in fines, has my warm approval, and it is my belief that
nothing Ijut the Frate's predominance could have pro-
cured that for us. And you may rely on it that Fra
Girolamo is as firm as a rock on that point of promotmg
peace. I have had an interview with liim."

There was a murmur of surprise and curiosity at the
farther end of the table; but Bernardo Rucellai simply
nodded, as if he knew what Tornabuoni had to say, and
wished him to go on.

"Yes," proceeded Tornabuoni, "I have been favored
with an interview in the Frate's own cell, which, let me
tell you, is not a common favor; for I have reason to
believe that even Francesco Valori very seldom sees him in
private. However, I think he saw me the more willingly
because I was not a ready-made follower, but had to be
converted. And, for my part, I see clearly enough that
the only safe and wise policy for us Mediceans to pursue is
to throw our strength into'^the scale of the Frate's party.
AVe are not strong enough to make head on our own
behalf; and if the Frate and the popular party were
upset, every one who hears me knows perfectly well what
other party Avould be uppermost just now: ISTerli, Alberti,
Pazzi, and the rest — Arrabbiati, as somebody christened
them the other day — who, instead of giving us an
amnesty, would be inclined to fly at our throats like mad
dogs, and not be satisfied till they had banished half
of us."

There were strong interjections of assent to this last
sentence of Tornabuoni's, as he paused and looked round
a moment.

"A wise dissimulation," he went on, " is the only course
for moderate rational men in times of violent party
feeling. I need hardly tell this company what are my
real political attachments: I am not the only man here
who has strong personal ties to the banished family; but,
apart from any such ties, I agree with my more expe-
rienced friends, who are allowing me to speak for them in
their presence, that the only lasting and peaceful state of
things for Florence is the predominance of some single
family interest. This theory of the Frate's, that we are
to have a po]mlar government, in which every man is to
strive only foi- the general good, and know no party

33G ROMOLA.

names, is a theory that may do for some isle of Cristoforo
Colombo's finding, but will never do for our fine old
quarrelsome Florence. A change must come before long,
and with patience and caution we have every chance of
determining the change in our favor. Meanwhile, the
best thing we can do will be to keep the Prate's flag flying,
for if any other were to be hoisted just now it would be
a black flag for us."

''It's true," said Niccolo Eidolfi, in a curt decisive way.
" What you say is true, Lorenzo. For my own part, I
am too old for anybody to l)elieve that I've changed my
feathers. And there are certain of us — our old Bernardo
del Nero for one — whom you would never persuade to
borrow another man's shield. Jiut we can lie still, like
sleepy old dogs; and it's clear enough that barking would
be of no use just now. As for this psalm-singing party,
who vote for nothing but the glory of God, and Avant to
make believe we can all love each other, and talk as
if vice can be swept out with a besom by the Magnificent
Eight, their day will not be a long one. After all the talk
of scholars, there are bnt two sorts of government: one
where men show their teeth at each other, and one where
men show tlieir tongues and lick the feet of the strongest.
They'll get their Great Council finally voted to-morrow —
that's certain enough — and they'll think they've found out
a new plan of government; but as sure as there's a human
skin under every lucco in the Council, their new plan will
end like every other, in snarling or in licking. That's my
view of things as a plain man. Not that I consider it
becoming in men of family and following, who have got
others deiDcnding on their constancy and on their sticking
to their colors, to go a hunting with a fine net to catch
reasons in the air, like doctors of law. I say frankly that,
as the head of my family, I shall be true to my old alliances;
and I have never yet seen any chalk-mark on political
reasons to tell me which is true and which is false. My
friend Bernardo Eucellai here is a man of reasons, I know,
and I have no objection to anybody's finding fine-spun
reasons for me, so that they don't interfere with ni}^ actions
as a man of family who has faith to keep with his connec-
tions."

''If that is an appeal to me, Niccolo," said Bernardo
Rucellai, with a formal dignity, in amui^ing contrast with
Ridolfi's curt and pithy ease, " I may take thisopi^ortunity
of saying, that while my wishes are partly determined by

A SUPPER rx THE RUCELLAI (iARDENS. S2^

long-standing personal relations, I cannot enter into any
positive schemes with persons over whose actions I have
no control. I myself might be content with a restoration
of the old order of things; but with modifications — with
important modifications, iind the one point on which I
wish to declare my concurrence with Lorenzo Tornabuoni
is, that the best policy to be jrarsued by our friends is, to
throw the weight of their interest into the scale of the
popular party. For myself, I condescend to no dissimula-
tion; nor do I at present see the party or the scheme that
commands my full assent. In all alike there is crudity
and confusion of ideas, and of all the twenty men who are
my colleagues in the present crisis, there is not one with
whom I do not find myself in wide disagreement."'

Xiccolo Eidolfi shrugged his shoulders, and left it to
some one else to take up the ball. As the wine went round
the talk became more and more frank and lively, and the
desire of several at once to be the chief speaker, as usual
caused the company to break up into small knots of two
and three.

It was a result which had been foreseen by Lorenzo Tor-
nabuoni and Giannozzo Pucci, and they were among the
first to turn aside from the highroad of general talk and
enter into a special conversation with Tito, who sat
between them; gradually pushing away their seats, and
turning their backs on the table and wine.

"In truth, Melema," Tornabuoni was saying at this
stage, laying one hose-clad leg across the knee of the other,
and caressing his ankle, ''I know of no man in Florence
who can serve our party better than you. You see what
most of our friends are: men who can no more hide their
prejudices than a dog can hide the natural tone of his
bark, or else men whose political ties are so notorious, that
they must always be objects of suspicion. Giannozzo here,
and I, I flatter myself, are able to overcome that suspicion;
we have that power of concealment and finesse, without
which a rational cultivated man, instead of having any
prerogative, is really at a disadvantage compared with a wild
bull or a savage. But, except yourself, I know of no one
else on whom we could rely for the necessary discretion."

'•'Yes," said Giannozzo Pucci, laying his hand on Tito's
shoulder, "the fact is, Tito mio, you can help us better
than if you were Ulysses himself, for I am convinced that
Ulysses often made himself disagreeable. To manage men
one ought to have a sharp mind in a velvet sheath. And

32G IIOMOLA.

. %

n^ ^ soul in Florence who could undertake a

's journey to Rome, for example, with the

'" you can. There is your scholarship,

^ys be a pretext for such journeys; and

,.Ler, there is your talent, which it would be

lO match than your scholarship. Niccolo Macchia-

.iii might have done for us if he had been on our side,

but hardly so well. He is too much bitten with notions,

and has not your power of fascination. All the worse for

him. He has lost a great chance in life, and you have

got it."

"Yes," said Tornabuoni, lowering his voice in a signifi-
cant manner, ''you have only to play your game well,
Melema, and the future belongs to you. For the Medici,
vou may rely upon it, will keep a foot in Eome as well as in
"Florence, and the time may not be far off when they will
be able to make a finer career for their adherents even
than they did in old days. Why shouldn't you take orders
some day? There's a cardinal's hat at the end of that road,
and you would not be the first Greek who has worn that
ornament."

Tito laughed gaily. He was too acute not to measure
Tornabuoni's exaggerated flattery, but still the flattery had
a pleasant flavor.

"My joints are not so stiif yet," he said, "that I can't
be induced to run without such a high prize as that. I
think the income of an abbey or two held ' incommcndam,'
without the trouble of getting my head shaved, would
satisfy me at present."

" I was not joking," said Tornabuoni, with grave suavity;
"I think a scholar would always be the better olf for
taking orders. But we'll talk of that another time. One
of the objects to be first borne in mind, is that you should
Avin the confidence of the men who hang about San Marco;
that is what Giannozzo and I shall do, but you may carry it
farther than we can, because you are less observed. In
that way you can get a thorough knowledge of their doings,
and you will make a broader screen for your agency on
our side. Nothing of course can be done before you start
for Rome, because this bit of business between Piero de
Medici and the French nobles must be effected at once.
I mean when you come back, of course; I need say no
more. I believe you could make yourself the pet votary
of San Marco, if you liked; but you arc wise enough to
know that effective dissimulation is never immoderate."

A SUrPER IN THE RUCELLAI GARDENS. 329

" If it were not that an adhesion to the popular side is
necessary to your safety as an agent of our party, Tito
mio," said Giaunozzo Pucci, who was more fraternal and
less patronizing in his manner than Tornabuoni, "I could
have wished your skill to have been employed in another
way, for which it is still better fitted. But now we must
look out for some other man among us who will manage
to get into the confidence of our sworn enemies, the
Arrabbiati; we need to know their movements more than
tliose of the Frate's party, who are strong enough to play
above-board. Still, it would have been a difficult thing
for you, from your known relations with the Medici a
little while back, and that sort of kinship your wife has
Avith Bernardo del Nero. We must find a man who has
no distinguished connections, and who has not yet taken
any side."

Tito was pushing his hair backward automatically, as
his manner was, and looking straight at Pucci with a
scarcely perceptible smile on his lip.

"No need to look out for any one else,''' he said,
promptlv. "1 can manage the whole business with perfect
ease. Iwill engage to make myself the special confident
of that thick-headed Dolfo Spini, and know his projects
before he knows them himself."

Tito seldom spoke so confidently of his own powers,
but he was in a state of exultation at the sudden opening
of a new path before him, where fortune seemed to have
hung higher prizes than any he had thought of hitherto.
Hitherto he had seen success only in the form of favor;
it now flashed on him in the shape of power — of such
power as is possible to talent without traditional ties, and
without beliefs. Each party that thought of him as a
tool might become dependent on him. His position as an
alien, his indifference to the ideas or prejudices of the
men amongst whom he moved, were suddenly transformed
into advantages; he became newly conscious of his own
adroitness m the presence of a game that he was called on
to play. And all the motives which might have made
Tito shrink from the triple deceit that came before him as
a tempting game, had been slowly strangled in him by the
successive falsities of his life.

Our lives make a moral tradition for our individual
selves, as the life of mankind at large makes a moral tra-
dition for the race; and to have once acted nobly seems a
reason why we should always be noble. But Tito was

330 ROMOLA.

feeling the eJBfect of an opposite tradition: he had won no
memories of self-conquest and perfect faithfulness from
which he could have a sense of falling.

The triple colloquy went on with growing spirit till it
was interrupted by a call from the table. Probably the
movement came from the listeners in the party, who were
afraid lest the talkers should tire themselves. At all
events it was agreed that there had been enough of gravity,
and Kucellai had just ordered new flasks of Montepulciano.

"How many minstrels are there among us?" he said,
Avhen there had been a general i-allying ]-ound the table.
"■ Melema, I think you are the chief : Matteo will give you
the lute."

''Ah, yes!" said Giannozzo Pucci, "lead the last chorus
from Poliziano's 'Orfeo,' that you have found such au
excellent measure for, and we will all fall in: —

'Ciascun segrua, o Bacco, te :
Bacco, Bacco, evo6, evo^ ! ' "

The servant put the lute into Tito's hands, and then
said something in an undertone to his master. A little
subdued questioning and answering went on between them,
Avhile Tito touched the lute in a preluding way to the
strain of the chorus, and there was a confusion of speech
and musical humming all round the table. Bernardo
Eucellai had said, " Wait a moment, Melema," but the
words had been unheard by Tito, who was leaning toward
Pucci, and singing low to him the phrases of the Maenad-
chorus. He noticed nothing until the buzz round the
table suddenly ceased, and the notes of his own voice,
with its soft low-toned triumph, "Evoe, evoe!" fell in
startling isolation.

It was a strange moment. Baldassarre had moved round
the table till he was o])posite Tito, and as the hum ceased
there might be seen for an instant Baldassarre's fierce dark
eyes bent on Tito's bright smiling unconsciousness, while
the low notes of triumph dropped from his lijis into the
silence.

Tito looked up with a slight start, and his lips turned
pale, but he seemed hardly more moved than Giannozzo
Pucci, who had looked up at the same moment — or even
than several others round the table; for that sallow deep-
lined face with the hatred in its eyes seemed a terrible
apparition across the wax-lit ease and gayety. And Tito
quickly recovered some self-command. "A mad old man —

▲ SUPPEE IN TH£ RUCELLAI GARDENS. 331

he looks like it — he is mad!" was the instantaneous
thought that brought some courage with it; for he could
conjecture no inward change in Baldassarre since they had
met before. He just let his eyes fall and laid the lute on
the table with apjDarent ease; but his fingers pinched the
neck of the lute hard while he governed his head and his
glance sufficiently to look with an air of quiet appeal
toward Bernardo Eucellai, who said at once —

" Good man, what is your business? What is the inijjor-
tant declaration that you have to make?''

"Messer Bernardo Rucellai, I wish you and your honor-
able friends to know in what sort of company you are
sitting. There is a traitor among you."

There was a general movement of alarm. Every one
present, except Tito, thought of political danger and not
of private injury.

Baldassarre began to speak as if he were thoroughly
assured of what he had to say; but^ in spite of his long
preparation for this moment, there was the tremor of over-
mastering excitement in his voice. His passion shook
him. He went on, but he did not say what he had meant
to say. As he fixed his eyes on Tito again the passionate
words were like blows — they defied premeditation.

'' There is a man among you who is a scoundrel, a liar,
a robber. I was a father to him. I took him from beg-
gary when he was a child. I reared him, I cherished him,
I taught him, I made him a scholar. My head has lain
hard that his might have a pillow. And he left me in
slavery; he sold the gems that were mine, and when I came
again he denied me."

The last words had been uttered with almost convulsed
agitation, and Baldassarre paused, trembling. All glances
Avere turned on Tito, who was now looking straight at
Baldassarre. It was a moment of desperation that anni-
hilated all feeling in him, except the determination to risk
anything for the chance of escape. And he gathered con-
fidence from the agitation by which Baldassarre was
evidently shaken. He had ceased to pinch the neck of the
lute, and had thrust his thumbs into his belt, while his
lips had begun to assume a slight curl. He had never yet
done an act of murderous cruelty even to the smallest
animal that could utter a cry, but at that moment he would
have been capable of treading the breath from a smiling
child for the sake of his own safety.

*'What does this mean, Melema?" said Bernardo

332 KOMOLA.

Kiicellai, in a tone of eiiutious surprise. He, as well as
the rest of the company, felt relieved that the tenor of the
accusation was not political.

" Messer Bernardo," said Tito, " I believe this man is
mad. I did not recognize him the first time he encountered-
me in Florence, but I know now that he is the servant who
years ago accompanied me and my adoptive father to
Greece, and was dismissed on account of misdemeanors.
His name is Jacopo di Nola. Even at that time I believe
his mind was unhinged, for, without any reason, he had
conceived a strange hatred toward me; and now I am con-
vinced that he is laboring under a mania which causes
him to mistake his identity. He has already attempted
my life since he has been in Florence; and I am in con-
stant danger from him. But he is an object of pity rather
than of indignation. It is too certain that my father is
dead. You have only my word for it; but I must leave it
to your judgment how far it is probable that a man of
intellect and learning would have been lurking about in.
dark corners for the last month with the purpose of assas-
sinating me; or how far it is probable that, if this man
were my second father, I could have any motive for deny-
ing him. That story about my being rescued from beggary
is the vision of a diseased brain. But it will be a satisfac-
tion to me at least if you will demand from him proofs of
his identity, lest any malignant person should choose to
make this mad impeachment a reproach to me."

Tito had felt more and more confidence as he went on;
the lie was not so difficult when it was once begun; and as
the words fell easily from his lips, they gave him a sense
of power such as men feel when they have begun a muscu-
lar feat successfully. In this way he acquired boldness
enough to end with a challenge for proofs.

Baldassarre, while he had been walking in the gardens
and afterward waiting in an outer room of the pavilion
with the servants, had been making anew the digest of the
evidence he would bring to prove his identity and Tito's
baseness, recalling the description and history of his gems,
and assuring himself by rapid mental glances that he could
attest his learning and his travels. It might be partly
owing to this nervous strain that the new shock of rage he
felt as Tito's lie fell on his ears brought a strange bodily
effect with it: a cold stream seemed to rush over him, and
tlie last Avords of the speech seemed to be drowned by ring-
ing chimes. Thought gave way to a dizz}' horror, as if

A SUPPER IN THE EUCELLAl C4ARDEKS. '66'6

the earth were slipping away from under him. Every one
in the room was looking at him as Tito ended, and saw
that the eyes which had had such fierce intensity only a
few minutes before had now a vague fear in them. He
clutched the back of a seat, and was silent.

Hardly any evidence could have been more in favor of
Tito's assertion. „ • ^

" Surely I have seen this man before, somewliere, said
Toruabuoni.

"Certainly you have," said Tito, readily, m a low tone.
''He is the escaped prisoner who clutched me on the steps
of the Duomo. I did not recognize him then; he looks
now more as he used to do, except that he has a more
unmistakable air of mad imbecility."

" I cast no doubt on vour word, Melema," said Bernardo
Eucellai, with cautious gravity, ''but you are right to
desire some positive test of the fact." Then turning to
Baldassarre, he said, "If you are the person you claim to
be, you can doubtless give some description of the gems
which were your property, I myself was the purchaser ot
more than one gem from Messer Tito— the chief rings, I
believe in his collection. One of them is a fine sard,
engraved with a subject from Homer. If, as you allege, you
are a scholar, and the rightful owner of that ring, you can
doubtless turn to the noted passage in Homer from which
that subject is taken. Do you accept this test, Melema?
or have you anything to allege against its validity? The
Jacopo you speak of, was he a scholar?"

It was a fearful crisis for Tito. If he said "Yes," his
quick mind told him that he would shake the credibihty
of his story: if he said "No," he risked everything on the
uncertain extent of Baldassarre's imbecility. But there
was no noticeable pause before he said, "No, I accept the
test." ^^ . , ^ ,

There was a dead silence while Eucellai moved toward
the recess where the books were, and came back with the
fine Florentine Homer m his hand. Baldassarre, when he
was addressed, had turned his head toward the speaker,
and Eucellai believed that he had understood him. But
he chose to repeat what he had said, that there might be
no mistake as to the test.

" The ring I possess," he said, " is a fine sard, engraved
with a subject from Homer. There was no other at all
resembling it in Messer Tito's collection. Will you turn
to the passage in Homer from which that subject is taken?

33-i BOMOLA.

Seat yourself here/' he added, laying the book on the
table, and pointing to his own seat while he stood beside it.

Baldassarre had so far recovered from the first confused
horror produced by the sensation of rushing coldness and
chiming din in the ears as to be partly aware of what was
said to him: he was aware that something was being
demanded from him to prove his identity, but he formed no
distinct idea of the details. The sight of the book recalled
the habitual longing and faint hope that he could read and
understand, and he moved toward the chair immediately.

The book was open before him, and he bent his head a
little toward it, while everybody watched him eagerly. He
turned no leaf. His eyes wandered over the pages that lay
before him, and then fixed on them a straining gaze. This
lasted for two or three minutes in dead silence. Then he
lifted his hands to each side of his head, and said, in a low
tone of despair, ''Lost, lost!"

There was something so piteous in the wandering look
and the low cry that while they confirmed the belief in his
madness they raised compassion. Nay, so distinct some-
times is the working of a double consciousness within us,
that Tito himself, while he triumphed in the apparent
verification of his lie, wished that he had never made the
lie necessary to himself — wished he had recognized his
father on the steps — wished he had gone to seek him —
wished everything had been different. But he had bor-
rowed from the terrible usurer Falsehood, and the loan had
mounted and mounted with the years, till he belonged to
the usurer, body and soul.

The compassion excited in all the witnesses was not
without its danger to Tito; for conjecture is constantly
guided by feeling, and more than one person suddenly
conceived that this man might have been a scholar and
have lost his faculties. On the other hand, they had not
present to their minds the motives which could have led
Tito to the denial of his benefactor, and having no ill-will
toward him, it would have been diflBcult to them to believe
that he had been uttering the basest of lies. And the
originally common type of Baldassarre's person, coarsened
by years of hardship, told as a confirmation of Tito's lie.
If Baldassarre, to begin with, could have uttered precisely
the words he had premeditated, there might have been
something in the form of his accusation which would have
given it the stamp not only of true experience but of
mental refinement. But there had been no such testimony

A SUPPEK IX THE KUCELLAI GAKDENS. 335

in his Impulsive agitated words: and there seemed the very
opposite testimony in the rugged face and the coarse hands
that trembled beside it, standing out in strong contrast in
the midst of that velvet-clad, fair-handed company.

His next movement, while he was being watched in
silence, told against him too. He took his hands from his
head, and felt for something under his tunic. Every one
guessed what that movement meant — guessed that there
Avas a weapon at his side. Glances were interchanged:
and Bernardo Rucellai said, in a quiet tone, touching
Baldassarre's shoulder —

" My friend, this is an important business of yours. You
shall have all justice. Follow me into a private room."

Baldassarre was still in that half-stunned state in which
he was susceptible to any prompting, in the same way as
an insect that forms no conception of what the prompting
leads to. He rose from his seat, and followed Eucellai out
of the room.

In two or three minutes Eucellai came back again, and
said —

" He is safe under lock and key. Piero Pitti, you are one
of the Magnificent Eight, what do you think of our send-
ing Matteo to the jialace for a couple of sbirri, who may
escort him to the Stiuche?* If there is any danger in him,
as I think there is, he will be safe there; and we can
inquire about him to-morrow."

Pitti assented, and the order was given.

" He is certainly an ill-looking fellow," said Tornabuoni.
*'And you say he has attempted your life already, Melema?"

And the talk turned on the various forms of madness,
and the fierceness of the southern blood. If the seeds of
conjecture unfavorable to Tito had been planted in the
mind of any one present, they were hardly strong enough
to grow without the aid of much daylight and ill-will. The
common-looking, wild-eyed old man, clad in serge, might
have won belief without very strong evidence, if he had
accused a man wdio was envied and disliked. As it was,
the only congruous and probable view of the case seemed
to be the one that sent the unpleasant accuser safely out of
sight, and left the pleasant serviceable Tito just where he
was before.

The subject gradually floated away, and gave place to
others, till a heavy tramp, and something like the strug-
gling of q, man who was being dragged away, were heard

* The largest prison in Florence,

33G ROMOLA.

outside. The sounds soon died out, and the interruption
seemed to make the last hour's conviviality more resolute
and vigorous. Every one was willing to forget a disagree-
able incident,

Tito's heart was palpitating, and the wine tasted no
better to him than if it had been blood.

To-night he had paid a heavier price than ever to make
himself safe. He did not like the price, and yet it was
inevitable that he should be glad of the purchase.

And after all he led the chorus. He was in a state
of excitement in which oppressive sensations, and the
wretched consciousness of something hateful but irrevoca-
ble, were mingled with a feeling of triumph which seemed
to assert itself as the feeling that would subsist and be
master of the morrow.

And it was master. For on the morrow, as we saw,
when he was about to start on his mission to Rome, he had
the air of a man well satisfied with the world.

CHAPTER XL.

AN ARRESTING VOICE.

When Romola sat down on the stone under the cypress,
all things conspired to give her the sense of freedom and
solitude: her escape from the accustomed walls and streets;
the widening distance from her husband, who was by this
time riding toward Siena, while every hour would take
her farther on the opposite way; the morning stillness; the
great dip of ground on the roadside making a gulf between
her and the sombre calm of the mountains. For the first
time in her life she felt alone in the presence of the earth
and sky, with no human presence interposing and making
a law for her.

Suddenly a voice close to her said —

''You are Romola de Bardi, the wife of Tito Melema."

She kne-w the voice: it had vibrated through her more
than once before; and be^'ause she knew it, she did not
turn round or look up. She sat shaken by awe, and yet
inwardly rebelling against tlie awe. It was one of those
black-skirted monks who was daring to speak to her, and
interfere with her privacy : that was all. And yet she

AN ARRESTING VOICE. 337

was shaken, as if that destiny which men thought of as a
sceptered deity had come to her, and grasped her with
fingers of flesh.

"You are fleeing from Florence in disguise. I have a
command from God to stop you. You are not permitted
to flee."

Komola's anger at the intrusion mounted higher at
these imperative words. She would not turn round to
look at the speaker, whose examining gaze she resented.
Sitting quite motionless, she said —

"What right have you to speak to me, or to hinder
me?"

" The right of a messenger. You have put on a religious
garb, and you have no religious purpose. You have sought
the garb as a disguise. But you were not suffered to pass
me without being discerned. It was declared to me who
you were : it is declared to me that you are seeking to
escape from the lot God has laid upon you. You wish
your true name and your true place in life to be hidden,
that you may choose for yourself a new name and a new
place, and have no rule but your own will. And I have
a command to call you back. My daughter, you must
return to your place."

Komola's mind rose in stronger rebellion with every
sentence. She was the more determined not to show any
sign of submission, because the consciousness of being
inwardly shaken made her dread lest she should fall into
irresolution. She spoke with more irritation than before.

"I will not return. I acknowledge no right of priests
and monks to interfere with my actions. You have no
power over me."

"I know — I know you have been brought up in scorn
of obedience. But it is not the poor monk who claims
to interfere with you: it is the truth that commands you.
And you cannot escape it. Either you must obey it, and
it will lead you; or you must disobey it, and it will hang
on you with the weight of a chain which you will drag
forever. But you will obey it, my daughter. Your old
servant will return to you with the mules; my companion
is gone to fetch him; and you will go back to Florence."

She started up with anger in her eyes, and faced the
speaker. It was Fra Girolamo: she knew that well enough
before. She was nearly as tall as he was, and their faces
were almost on a level. She had started up with defiant
words ready to burst from her lips, but they fell back
23

338 ROMOLA.

again without utterance. She had met Fra Girolamo's
calm glance, and the impression from it was so new to her,
that her anger sank ashamed as something irrelevant.

There was nothing transcendent in Savonarola's face.
It was not beautiful. It was strong-featured, and owed
all its refinement to habits of mind and rigid discipline
of the body. The source of the impression his glance
produced on Eomola was the sense it conveyed to lier of
interest in her and care for her apart from any personal
feeling. It was the first time she had encountered a gaze
in which simple human fellowship expressed itself as a
strongly-felt bond. Such a glance is half the vocation of
the priest or spiritual guide of men, and Romola felt it
impossible again to question his authority to speak to her.
She stood silent, looking at him. And he spoke again.

"You assert your freedom j^roudly, my daughter. But
who is so base as the debtor who thinks himself free?"

There was a sting in those words, and Komola's counte-
nance changed as if a subtle pale flash had gone over it.

"And you are flying from your debts: the debt of a
Florentine woman; the debt of a wife. You are turning
your back on the lot that has been appointed for you —
you are going to choose another. But can man or woman
choose duties? No more than they can choose their
birthplace or their father and mother. My daughter, you
are fleeing from the presence of God into the wilderness."

As the anger melted from Komola's mind, it had given
place to a new presentiment of the strength there might
be in submission, if this man, at whom she was beginning
to look with a vague reverence, had some valid law to
show her. But no — it was impossible; he could not know
what determined her. Yet she could not again simi)ly
refuse to be guided; she was constrained to plead; and in
her new need to be reverent while she resisted, the title
which she had never given him before came to her lips
without forethought.

"My father, you cannot know the reasons which compel
me to go. None can know them but^ myself. None can
judge for me. I have been driven by great sorrow. I am
resolved to go."

"I know enough, my daughter: my mind has been so
far illuminated concerning you, that I know enough. You
are not happy in your married life; but I am not a con-
fessor, and I seek to know notliing that sliould be reserved
for the seal of confession. 1 have a divine warrant to stop

AN ARRESTING VOICE. 339

3'oii, whicli does not depend on sucli knowledge. You
were warned by a message from heaven, delivered in my
presence — you were warned before marriage, when you
might still have lawfully cliosen to be free from the mar-
riage-bond. But you chose the bond; and in willfully
bre'aking it — I speak to you as a pagan, if the holy mystery
of matrimony is not sacred to you — you are breaking a
l)ledge. Of what wrongs will you complain, my daughter,
when you yourself are committing one of the greatest
wrongs a woman and a citizen can be guilty of— withdraw-
ing in secrecy and disguise from a pledge which you have
given in the face of God and your fellow-men? Of what
wrongs will you complain when you yourself are breaking the
simplest law that lies at the foundation of the trust Avhich
binds man to man — faithfulness to the spoken Avord?
This, then, is the wisdom you have gained by scorning the
mysteries of the Church? — not to see the bare duty of
integrity, where the Church would have taught you to see,
not integrity only, but religion."

The blood had rushed to Romola's face, and she shrank
as if she had been stricken, '-'I would not have put on a
disguise," she began; but she could not go on, — she was
too much shaken by the suggestion in the Frate's words of
a possible affinity between her own conduct and Tito's.

''And to break that pledge you fly from Florence:
Florence, where there are the only men and women in the
world to whom you owe the debt of a fellow-citizen."

" I should never have quitted Florence," said Eomola,
tremulously, "as long as there was any hope of my fulfill-
ing a duty to my father there."

''And do you own no tie but that of a child to her father
in the flesh? Your life has been spent in blindness, my
daughter. You have lived with those who sit on a hill
aloof and look down on the life of their fellow-men. I
know their vain discourse. It is of what has been in the
times Avhich they fill with their own fancied wisdom, while
they scorn God's work in the present. And doubtless you
were taught how there were pagan women who felt what
it was to live for the Republic; yet you have never felt
that you, a Florentine woman, should live for Florence.
If your own people are wearing a yoke, will you slip from
under it, instead of struggling with them to lighten it?
There is hunger and misery in our streets, yet you say, ' I
care not; I have my own sorrows; I will go away, if perad-
venture I can ease them.' The servants of God are strug-

340 romoLa.

gling after a law of justice, peace, and chanty, tnat the
hundred tliousand citizens among whom you "were born
may be governed righteously; but you think no more of
this than if you were a bird, that may spread its
wings and fly whither it will in search of food to its
liking. And yet you have scorned the teaching of the
Church, my daughter. As if you, a willful wanderer, fol-
lowing your own blind choice, were not below the humblest
Florentine woman who stretches forth her hands with her
own people, and craves a blessing for them; and feels a
close sisterhood with the neighbor who kneels beside her
and is not of her own blood; and tliinks of the mighty
purpose that God has for Florence; and waits and endures
because the promised work is great, and she feels herself
little."

"I M-as not going away to ease and self-indulgence,"
said Eomola, raising her head again, with a prompting to
vindicate herself. "I was going away to hardship. I
expect no joy: it is gone from my life."

"You are seeking your own will, my daughter. You
are seeking some good other tlian the law you are bound
to obey. But how will you find good? It is not a thing
of choice: it is a river that flows from the foot of the
Invisible Throne, and flows by the path of obedience. I
say again, man cannot choose his duties. You may choose
to forsake your duties, and choose not to have the sorrow
they bring. But you will go forth; and what will you
find, my daughter? Sorrow without duty— bitter herbs,
and no bread with tliem."

"But if you knew," said Eomola, clasping her hands
and pressing them tight, as she looked pleadingly at Fra
Girolamo; "if you knew what it was to me — how impossi-
ble it seemed to me to bear it."

"My daughter," he said, pointing to the cord round
Komola's neck, "you carry something within your mantle;
draw it forth and look at it."

Eomola gave a slight start, but her impulse now was to
do just what Savonarola told her. Her self-doubt was
grappled by a stronger will and a stronger conviction than
her own. She drew forth the crucifix. Still pointing
toward it, he said —

" There, my daughter, is the image of a Supreme Offer-
ing, made by Supreme Love, because the need of man was
great."

He paused, and she held the crucifix trembling — trem-

AN ARRESTING VOICE. 341

bling under a sudden impression of the wide distance
between her present and her past self. What a length of
road she had traveled through since she first took that
crucifix from the Frate's hands I Had life as many secrets
before her still as it had for her then, in her young blind-
ness? It was a thought that helped all other subduing
influences; and at the sound of Fra Girolamo's voice
again, Eomola, with a quick involuntary movement,
pressed the crucifix against her mantle and looked at
him with more submission than before.

"Conform your life to that image, my daughter; make
your sorrow an offering: and when the fire of Divine char-
ity burns within you, and you behold the need of your
fellow-men by the light of that flame, you will not call
your offering great. You have carried yourself proudly,
as one who held herself not of common blood or of com-
mon thoughts; but you have been as one unborn to the
true life of man. What! 3^ou say your love for your father
no longer tells 3'ou to stay in Florence? Then, since that tie
is snapped, you are without a law, without religion: you
are no better than a beast of the field when she is robbed
of her young. If the yearning of a fleshly love is gone,
you are without love, without obligation. See, then, my
daughter, how you are below the life of the believer who
worships the image of the Supreme Offering, and feels the
glow of a common life with the lost multitude for whom
that offering was made, and beholds the history of the
world as a history of the great redemption in which he is
himself a fellow- worker, in his own place and among his
own people! If you held that faith, my beloved daughter,
you would not be a wanderer flying from suffering, and
blindly seeking the good of a freedom which is lawlessness.
You would feel that Florence was the home of your soul
as well as your birthplace, because you would see the work
that was given you to do there. If you forsake your place,
who Avill fill it? You ought to be in your place now, help-
ing in the great w^ork by which God will purify Florence,
and raise it to be the guide of the nations. Wliat! the
earth is full of iniquity — full of groans — the light is still
struggling with a mighty darkness, and you say, ' I cannot
bear my bonds; I will burst them asunder; I will go where
no man claims me ' ? My daughter, every bond of your
life is a debt: the right lies in the payment of that debt;
it can lie nowhere else. In vain will you wander over the
earth; you will be wandering forever away from tlie right."

lii'Z ROMOLA.

Romola was inwardly struggling with strong forces: that
immense personal influence of Savonarola, which came
from the energy of his emotions and beliefs; and her
consciousness, surmounting all prejudice, that his Avords
implied a higher law than any she had yet obeyed. But
the resisting thoughts Avere not yet overborne.

''How, then, could Dino be right? He broke ties. He
forsook his place."

"That was a special vocation. He was constrained to
depart, else he could not have attained the higher life. It
would have been stifled within him."

"And I too," said Romola, raising her hands to her
brow, and speaking in a tone of anguish, as if she were
being dragged to some torture. "Father, you may be
Avrong. "

"Ask your conscience, my daughter. You have no
vocation such as your brother had. You are a wife. You
seek to break your ties in self-will and anger, not because
the higher life calls upon you to renounce them. The
higher life begins for us, my daughter, when we renounce
our own will to bow before a Divine law. That seems hard
to you. It is the portal of wisdom, and freedom, and
blessedness. And the symbol of it hangs before you.
That wisdom is the religion of the Cross. And you stand
aloof from it: you are a pagan; you have been taught to
say, ' I am as the wise men who lived before the time when
the Jew "oi Nazareth was crucified.' And that is your wis-
dom ! To be as the dead whose eyes are closed, and whose
ear is deaf to tlie work of God that has been since their
time. What has your dead wisdom done for )'ou, my
daughter ? It has left you without a heart for the
neighbors among whom you dwell, without care for the
great work by which Florence is to be regenerated and the
world made holy; it has left you without a share in the
Divine life which quenches the sense of suffering Self in
the ardors of an ever-growing love. And now, when
the sword has pierced 3'Our soul, you say, 'I will go away;
I cannot bear my sorrow.' And you think nothing of the
sorrow and the wrong that are within the walls of the city
where you dwell: you would leave your place empty, when
it ought to be filled with your pity and your labor. If
there is wickedness in the streets, your steps should shine
with the light of purity; if there is a cry of anguish, you,
my daughter, because you know the meaning of the cry,
should be there to still it. My beloved daughter, sorrow

AX ARRESTING VOICE. 343

has come to teach you a new worship: the sign of it hangs
before you/^

Romola's mind was still torn by conflict. She foresaw
that she should obey Savonarola and go back: his words
had come to her as if they were an interpretation of that
revulsion from self-satisfied ease, and of that new fellow-
ship with suffering, which had already been awakened in
her. His arresting voice had brought a new condition into
her life, which made it seem impossible to her that she
could go on her way as if she had not heard it; yet she
shrank as one who sees the path she must take, but sees,
too, that the hot lava lies there. And the instinctive
shrinking from a return to her husband brought doubts.
She turned away her eyes from Fra Girolamo; and stood
for a minute or two with her hands hanging clasped
before her, like a statue. At last she spoke, as if the
words were being wrung from her, still looking on the
ground.

"Mv husband he is not my love is gone! "

''My daughter, there is the bond of a higher love.
Marriage is not carnal only, made for selfish delight. See
what that thought leads you to I It leads you to wander
away in a false garb from all the obligations of your place
and name. That would not have been, if you had learned
that it is a sacramental vow, from which none but God
can release you. My daughter, your life is not as a grain
of sand, to' be blown by the winds; it is a thing of
flesh and blood that dies if it be sundered. Your husband
is not a malefactor?"

Romola started. ''Heaven forbid! No; I accuse him
of nothing."

"I did not suppose he was a malefactor. I meant, that
if he were a malefactor, your place would l)e in the prison
beside him. My daughter, if the cross comes to you as a
wife, you must carry it as a wife. You may say, 'I will
forsake my husband,' but you cannot cease to be a wife."

"Yet if — oh, how could I bear " Romola had invol-
untarily begun to say something which she sought to
banish from her mind again.

"Make your marriage-sorrows an offering too, my
daughter: an offering to the great work by which sin
and sorrow are being made to cease. The end is sure, and
is alreadv beginning. Here in Florence it is beginning,
and the eyes of faith behold it. And it may be our bless-
edness to die for it: to die daily by the crucifixion of our

344 ROMOLA. ~

selfish will — to die at last by laying our bodies on the altar.
My daughter, you a child of Florence; fulfill the duties of
that great inheritance. Live for Florence — for your own
people, whom God is preparing to bless the earth. Bear
the anguish and the smart. The iron is sharp — I know, I
know — it rends the tender flesh. The draught is bitter-
ness on the lips. But there is rapture in the cup — there
is the vision which makes all life below it dross forever.
Come, my daughter, come back to your place! "

While Savonarola spoke with growing intensity, his
arms tightly folded before him still, as they had been from
the first, but his face alight as from an inward flame,
Romolafelt herself surrounded and possessed by the glow of
his passionate faith. The chill doubts all melted' away;
she was subdued by the sense of something unspeakably
great to which she was being called by a strong being who
roused a new strength within herself. In a voice that was
like a low, prayerful cry, she said —

" Father, I will be guided. Teach me! I will go back."

Almost unconsciously she sank on her knees. Savonarola

stretched out his hands over her; but feeling would no

longer pass through the channel of speech, and he was

silent.

CHAPTER XLI.

COMING BACK.

" Rise, my daughter," said Fra Girolamo at last. " Your
servant is waiting not far off with the mules. It is time
that I should go onward to Florence."

Romola arose from her knees. That silent attitude had
been a sort of sacrament to her, confirming the state of
yearning passivity on which she had newly entered. By
the one act of renouncing her resolve to quit her husband,
hnr v/ill seemed so utterly bruised tliat she felt the need of
direction even in small things. She lifted up the edge of
her cowl, and saw Maso and the second Dominican stand-
ing with their backs toward her on the edge of tlie hill
about ten yards from her; but she looked at Savonarola
again without speaking, as if the order to Maso to turn
back must come from him and not from her.

COMING BACK. 345

*^ I will go and call them/' he said, answering her glance
of appeal, " and I will recommend you, my daughter, to
the Brother who is with me. You desire to put yourself
under guidance, and to learn that wisdom which has been
hitherto as foolishness to you. A chief gate of that
wisdom is the sacrament of confession. You will need a
confessor, my daughter, and I desire to put you under the
care of Fra Salvestro, one of the brethren of San Marco, in
whom I most confide."

"I would rather have no guidance but yours, father,"
said Romola, looking anxious.

"My daughter, I do not act as a confessor. The voca-
tion I have withdraws me from offices that would force me
into frequent contact with the laity, and interfere with my
special duties."

''Then shall I not be able to speak to you in private?

if I waver, if " Eomola broke off from rising agitation.

She felt a sudden alarm lest her new strength in renuncia-
tion should vanish if the immediate personal influence of
Savonarola vanished.

"My daughter, if your soul has need of the word in
private from my lips, you will let me know it through Fra
Salvestro, and I will see you in the sacristy or in the choir
of San Marco. And I will not cease to watch over you.
I will instruct my brother concerning you, that he may
guide you into that path of labor for the suffering and the
hungry to which you are called as a daughter of Florence
in these times of hard need. I desire to behold you
among the feebler and more ignorant sisters as the apple-
tree among the trees of the forest, so that your fairness
and all natural gifts may be but as a lamp through which
the Divine light shines the more purely. I will go now
and call your servant."

When Maso had been sent a little way in advance, Fra
Salvestro came forward, and Savonarola led Roniola
toward him. She had beforehand felt an inward shrink-
ing from a new guide who was a total stranger to her: but
to have resisted Savonarola's advice would have been to
assume an attitude of independence at a moment wlien all
her strength must be drawn from the renunciation of inde-
pendence. And the whole bent of her mind now was
toward doing what was painful rather than what was easy.
She bowed reverently to Fra Salvestro before looking
directly at him; but when she raised her head and saw
him fully, her reluctance became a palpitating doubt.

34G EOMOLA.

There are men whose presence infuses trust and reverence;
there are others to whom we have need to carry our trust
and reverence ready-made; and that difference flashed on
Eomola as she ceased to have Savonarohx before her, and
saw in his stead Fra Salvestro Maruffi. It was not that
there was anythiug manifestly repulsive in Fra Salvestro's
face and manner, any air of hypocrisy, any tinge of
coarseness; his face was handsomer than Fra Girolamo's,
his person a little taller. He was the long accepted
confessor of many among the chief personages in Florence,
and had therefore had large experience as a spiritual
director. But his face had the vacillating expression
of a mind unable to concentrate itself strongly in the
channel of one great emotion or belief — an expression
which is fatal to influence over an ardent nature like
Eomola's. Such an expression is not the stamp of insin-
cerity; it is the stamp simply of a shallow soul, which will
often be found sincerely striving to fill a high vocation,
sincerely composing its countenance to the utterance
of sublime formulas, but finding the muscles twitch or
relax in spite of belief, as prose insists on coming instead
of poetry to the man who has not the divine frenzy. Fra
Salvestro had a peculiar liability to visions, dependent
apparently on a constitution given to somnambulism.
Savonarola believed in the supernatural character of these
visions, while Fra Salvestro himself had originally resisted
such an interpretation of them, and had even rebuked
Savonarola for his prophetic preaching: another proof, if
one were wanted, that the relative greatness of men is not
to be gauged by their tendency to disbelieve the supersti-
tious of their age. For of these two there can be no ques-
tion which was the great man and which the small.

The difference between them was measured very accu-
rately by the change in Romola's feeling as Fra Salvestro
began to address her in words of exhortation and encour-
agement. After her first angry resistance of Savonarola
Iiad passed away, she had lost all remembrance of the old
dread lest any influence should drag her within the circle
of fanaticism and sour monkish piety. But now again,
the chill breath of that dread stole over her. It could
have no decisive effect against the impetus her mind had
just received; it was only like the closing of the gray clouds
over the sunrise, which made her retiirning path monoto-
nous and sombre.

And perhajis of all sombre paths that on which we go

C'OMIKG BACK. 347

back after treading it witii a strong resolution is the one
that most severely tests the fervor of reniinoiation. As
thev re-entered the city gates the light snow-flakes fell
about them; and as the gray sister walked hastdy home-
ward from the Piazza di Han Marco, and trod the bridge
again, and turned in at the large door in the Via de Bardi,
her footsteps were marked darkly on the thin carpet of
snow, and her cowl fell laden and damp about her face.

She went up to her room, threw off her serge, destroyed
the parting letters, replaced all her precious trifles, unbound
her hair, and put on her usual black dress. Instead of
taking a long exciting journey, she was to sit down in her
usual place. The snow fell against the windows and she
was alone.

She felt the dreariness, yet her courage was high, like
that of a seeker who has come on new signs of gold. She
Avas going to thread life by a fresh clue. She had thrown
all the energy of her will into renunciation. The empty
tabernacle remained locked, and she placed Dino's crucifix
outside it.

Nothing broke the outward monotony of her solitary
home, till the night came like a white ghost at the win-
dows. Yet it was the most memorable Christmas-eve in
her life to Romola, this of 1494.

BOOK III.
CHAPTEK XLII.

KOMOLA IN HEE PLACE.

It was the thirtieth of October, 1496. The sky that
morning was clear enough, and there was a pleasant
autumnal breeze. But the Florentines just then thought
very little about the land breezes: they were thinking of
the gales at sea, which seemed to be uniting with all other
jiowers to disprove the Frate's declaration that Heaven
took special caie of Florence.

For those terrible gales had driven away from- the coast
of Leghorn certain ships from Marseilles, freighted with
soldiery and corn; and Florence was in the direst need,
first for food, and secondly of fighting men. Pale Famine
was in her streets, and her territory was threatened on all
its borders.

For the French king, that new Charlemagne, who had
entered Italy in anticipatory triumph, and had conquered
Naples without the least trouble, had gone away again
fifteen months ago, and Avas even, it was feared, in his
grief for the loss of a new-born son, losing the languid
intention of coming back again to redress grievances and
set the church in order. A league had been formed against
him — a Holy League, with Pope Borgia at its head — to
*' drive out the barbarians," who still garrisoned the for-
tress of Naples, That had a patriotic sound; but, looked
at more closely, the Holy League seemed very much like
an agreement among certain wolves to drive away all other
wolves, and then to see which among themselves could
snatch the largest share of the prey. And there was a gen-
eral disposition to regard Florence not as a fellow-wolf,
but rather as a desirable carcass. Florence, therefore, of
all the chief Italian States, had alone declined to join the
League, adhering still to the French alliance.

She had declined at her peril. At this moment Pisa,
still fighting suvagely for lilx'rty, was being encouragi'd not
only by strong forces from Venice and Alilan, but l)V the

348

ROMOLA IX SER PLACE. 349

presence of the German Emperor Maximilian, who had
been invited by the League, and was joining the Pisans
with such troops as he had in the attempt to get^ posses-
sion of Leghorn, while the coast was invested by Venetian
and Genoese ships. And if Leghorn should fall into tlie
hands of the enemy, woe to Florence! For if that one
outlet toward the sea were closed, hedged in as she was on
the land by the bitter ill-will of the Pope and the jealousy
of smaller' States, liow could succors reach her?

The government of Florence had sliown a great heart in
this urgent need, meeting losses and defeats with vigorous
effort, raising fresh money, raising fresh soldiers, but not
neglecting the good old method of Italian defense — concil-
iatory embassies. And while the scarcity of food was
every day becoming greater, they had resolved, in opposi-
tion'to old precedent, not to shut out the starving country
people, and the mendicants driven from the gates of otlier
cities, who came flocking to Florence like birds from a
land of snow.

These acts of a government in which the disciples of
Savonarola made the strongest element wore not allowed
to pass without criticism. The disaffected were plentiful,
and they saw clearly that the government took the worst
course for the public welfare. Florence ought to join the
League and make common cause with the other great
Italian States, instead of drawing down their hostility by
a futile adherence to a foreign ally. Florence ought to
take care of her own citizens, instead of opening her gates
to famine and pestilence in the shape of starving contadini
and alien mendicants.

Every day the distress became sharper: every day the
murmurs became louder. And, to crown the difficulties
of the government, for a month and more — in obedience
to a mandate from Eome — Fra Girolamo had ceased to
preach. But on the arrival of the terrible news that the
ships from Marseilles had been driven back, and that no
corn was coming, the need for the voice that could infuse
faith and patience into the people became too imperative
to be resisted. In defiance of the Papal mandate the
Signoria requested Savonarola to preach. And two days
ago he had mounted again the pulpit of the Duomo, and
had told the people only to wait and be steadfast and the
divine help would certainly come.

It was a bold sermon: he consented to have his frocTc
stripped off him if, when Florence ptTsevered in fulfilling

350 ROMOLA.

the duties of piety and citizenship, God did not come to
her rescue.

Yet at present, on this morning of the thirtieth, there
were no signs of rescue. Perhajos if the precious Taber-
nacle of the Madonna dell Impruneta were brought into
Florence and carried in devout j^rocession to the Duomo,
that Mother, rich in sorrows and therefore in mere}-,
would plead for the suffering city? For a century and a
half there were records how the Florentines, suffering
from drought, or flood, or famine, or pestilence, or the
threat of wars, had fetched the potent image within their
walls, and had found deliverance. And grateful honor
had been done to her and her ancient church of L'lmpru-
neta; the high house of Buondelmonti, patrons of the
church, had to guard her hidden image with bare sword;
wealth had been j^oured out for prayers at her shrine, for
chantings, and chapels, and ever-burning lights; and
lands had been added, till there was much quarreling for
the privilege of serving her. The Florentines were deeply
convinced of her graciousness to them, so that the sight
of her tabernacle within their walls was like the parting
of the cloud, and the proverb ran, that the Florentines
had a Madonna who would do what they pleased.

When were they in more need of her pleading pity than
now ? And already, the evening before, the tabernacle
containing the miraculous hidden image had been brought
with high and reverend escort from LTmpruneta, the
privileged spot six miles beyond the gate of San Piero
that looks toward Rome, and had been deposited in the
church of San Gaggio, outside the gate, whence it was to
be fetched in solemn procession by all the fraternities,
trades, and authorities of Florence.

But the Pitying Mother had not yet entered within the
walls, and the morning arose on unchanged misery and
despondency. Pestilence was hovering in the track of
famine. Not only the hospitals were full, but the court-
yards of private houses had been turned into refuges and
infirmaries ; and still there Avas unsheltered want. And
early this morning, as usual, members of the various frater-
nities who made it part of their duty to bury the unfriended
dead, were bearing away the corpses that had sunk by the
wayside. As usual, sweet womanly forms, with the refined
air and carriage of the well-born, but in the plainest garb,
were moving about tlie streets on their daily errands of
tending the sick and relieving the hungry.

ROMOLA IX HER PLACE. 351

One of these forms was easily distinguishable as Komola
de Bardi. Clad iu the simplest garment of black serge,
with a plain piece of black drapery drawn over her head,
so as to hide all her hair, except the bands of gold that
rippled apart on her brow, she was advancing from the
Ponte Vecchio toward the Por' Santa Maria — the street
in a direct line with the bridge — when she found her
way obstructed by the pausing of a bier, which was being
carried by members of the company of San Jacopo del
Popolo, in search for the unburied dead. The brethren
at the head of the bier were stooping to examine some-
thing, while a group of idle workmen, with features paled
and sharpened by hunger, were clustering around and all
talking at once.

" He's dead, I tell you! Messer Domeneddio has loved
him well enough to take him."

''Ah, and it would be well for us all if we could have
our legs stretched out and go with our heads two or three
bracci foremost! It's ill standing upright with hunger to
prop you."

" Well, well, he's an old fellow. Death has got a poor
bargain. Life's had the best of him."

"And no Florentine, ten to one! A beggar turned ovit
of Siena. San Giovanni defend us! They've no need of
soldiers to fight us. They send us an army of starving
men."

"No, no! This man is one of the prisoners turned out
of the Stinche. I know by the gray patch where the
prison badge was.'

"Keep quiet! Lend a hand! Don't you see the brethren
are going to lift him on the bier?"

" It's likely he's alive enough if he could only look it.
The soul may be inside him if it had only a drop of ver-
iiaccia to warm it."

"In truth, I think he is not dead," said one of the
brethren, when they had lifted him on the bier. " He has
perhaps only sunk down for want of food."

"Let me try to give him some wine." said Romola,
coming forward. She loosened the small flask which she
carried at her belt, and, leaning toward the prostrate body,
with a deft hand she applied a small ivory implement
between the teeth, and poured into the mouth a few drops
of wine. The stimulus acted: the wine was evidently
swallowed. She jtoured more, till the head was moved a
little toward her, and the eyes of the old man opened full

'652 ROMOLA.

upon her with the vague look of returning consciousness.
Then for tlie first time a sense of complete recognition
came over Romola. Those wild dark eyes opening in the
sallow deep-lined face, with the white beard, which was
now long again, were like an unmistakable signature to a
remembered handwriting. The light of two summers had
not made that image any fainter in Eomola's memory:
the image of the escaped prisoner, whom she had seen in
the Duomo the day when Tito first wore the armor — at
whose grasp Tito had paled with terror in the strange
sketch she had seen in Piero's studio. A wretched tremor
and palpitation seized her. Now at last, perhaps, she was
going to know some secret which might be more bitter than
all that had gone before. She felt an impulse to dart away
as from a sight of horror; and again, a more imperious
need to keep close by the side of this old man whom, the
divination of keen feeling told her, her husband had
injured. In the very instant of this conflict she still
leaned toward him and kept her right hand ready to
administer more wine, while her left was passed under his
neck. Her hands trembled, but their habit of soothing
helpfulness would have served to guide them without the
direction of her thought.

Baldassarre was looking at her for the first time. The
close seclusion in which Eomola's trouble had kept her in
the weeks preceding her flight and his arrest, had denied
him the opportunity he had sought of seeing the Wife who
lived in the Via de Bardi: and at this moment the descrip-
tions he had heard of the fair golden-haired woman were
all gone, like yesterday's waves.

" Will it not be well to carry him to the steps of San
Stefano?" said Romola. "We shall cease then to stop up
the street, and you can go on your way with your bier."

They had only to move onward for about thirty yards
before reaching the steps of San Stefano, and by this time
Baldassarre was able himself to make some efi'orts toward
getting off the bier, and propping himself on the steps
against the church doorAvay. The charitable brethren
passed on, but the group of interested spectators, who had
nothing to do and much to say, had considerably increased.
The feeling toward the old man was not so entirely friendly
now it was quite certain that he was alive, but the respect
inspired hj Eomola's presence caused the passing remarks
to be made in a rather more subdued tone tlian before.

" Ah, they gave him his morsel every day in the Stiuche —

ROMOLA IN HER PLACE. 353

that's why he can't do so well without it. You and I,
Cecco, know better what is to go to bed fasting."

',' Gnajfe ! that's why the Magnificent Eight have turned
out some of the prisoners, that they may shelter houest
people instead. But if every thief is to be brought to
life with good wine and wheaten bread, we Oiompi had
better go and fill ourselves in Arno while the water's plenty."

Eomola had seated herself on the steps by Baldassarre,
and was saying, " Can you eat a little bread now? perhaps
by-and-by you will be able, if I leave it with you. I must
go on, because I have promised to be at the hospital. But
I will come back if you will wait here, and then I will take
you to some shelter. Do you understand? AVill you wait?
I will come back."

He looked dreamily at her, and repeated her words,
''come back." It was no wonder that his mind was enfee-
bled by his bodily exhaustion, but she hoped that he-
apprehended her meaning. She opened her basket, which
was filled with pieces of soft bread, and put one of the
pieces into his hand.

" Do you keep your bread for those that can't swallow,
madonna? " said a rough-looking fellow, in a red night-cap,
who had elbowed his way into the inmost circle of specta-
tors— a circle that was pressing rather closely on Romola.

"If anybody isn't hungry," said another, "I say, let
him alone. He's better off than people who've got craving
stomachs and no breakfast."

"Yes, indeed; if a man's a mind to die, it's a time to
encourage him, instead of making him come back to life
against his will. Dead men want no trencher."

"Oh, you don't understand the Frate's charity," said a
young man in an excellent cloth tunic, whose face showed
no signs of want. "The Frate has been preaching to the
birds, like Saint Anthony, and he's been telling the hawks
they were made to feed the sparrows, as every good Floren-
tine citizen was made to feed six starving beggarmen from
Arezzo or Bologna. Madonna, there, is a pious Piagnone:
she's not going to throw away her good bread on honest
citizens who've got all the Frate's prophecies to swallow."

".Come, madonna," said he of the red cap, "the old
thief doesn't eat the bread, you see: you'd better try m5.
We fast so much, we're half saints already."

The circle had narrowed till the coarse men — most of
them gaunt from privation — had left hardly any margin
round Romola. She had been taking from her basket a
33

354 ROMOLA.

small horn cup, into which she put the piece of bread and
just moistened it with wine; and hitherto she had not
appeared to heed them. But now she rose to her feet, and
looked round at them. Instinctively the men who were
nearest to her pushed backward a little, as if their rude
nearness were the fault of those behind. Romola held out
the basket of bread to the man in the night-cap, looking
at him without any reproach in her glance, as she said —
"Hunger is hard to bear, T know, and you have the
power to take this bread if you will. It was saved for sick
women and children. You are strong men; but if you do
not choose to suffer because you are strong, you have the
power to take everything from the weak. You can take
the bread from this basket; but I shall watch by this old
man; I shall resist your taking the bread from him."

For a few moments there was perfect silence, while
Eomola looked at the faces before her, and held out the
basket of bread. Her own pale face had the slightly
pinched look and the deepening of the eye-socket which
indicate unusual fasting in the habitually temperate, and
tlie large direct gaze of her hazel eyes was all the more
impressive.

The man in the night-cap looked rather silly, and
backed, thrusting his elbow into his neighbor's ribs with
an air of moral rebuke. The backing was general, every
one wishing to imply that he had been pushed forward
against his will; and the young man in the fine cloth tunic
had disapjDeared.

But at this moment the armed servitors of the Signoria,
who had begun to patrol the line of streets through which
the procession was to pass, came up to disperse the group
Avhich was obstructing the narrow street. The man
addressed as Cecco retreated from a tlireatening mace up
the church steps, and said to Romola, in a respectful
tone —

" Madonna, if you want to go on your errands, I'll take
care of the old man."

Cecco was a wild-looking figure: a very ragged tunic,
made shaggy and variegated by cloth-dust and clinging
fragments of wool, gave relief to a pair of bare bony arms
and a long sinewy neck; his square jaw shaded by a bristly
black beard, his bridgeless nose and low forehead, made his
face look as if it had been crushed down for purposes of
packing, and a narrow piece of red rag tied over his ears

THE UNSEEN MADONNA. 355

seemed to assist in the compression. Eomola looked at
him with some hesitation.

" Don't distrust me, madonna," said Cecco, who under-
stood her look perfectly. " I am not so pretty as you, but
I've got an old mother who eats my porridge for me.
What! there's a heart inside me, and I've bought a candle
for the most Holy Virgin before now. Besides, see there,
the old fellow is eating his sop. He's hale enough: he'll
be on his legs as well as the best of us, by-and-by."

" Thank you for offering to take care of him, friend,"
said Eomola, rather penitent for her doubting glance.
Then leaning to Baldassarre, she said, " Pray wait for me
till I come again."

He assented with a slight movement of the head and
hand, and Eomola went on her way toward the hospital
of San Matteo, in the Piazza di San Marco.

CHAPTEE XLIII.

THE UNSEEN MADONNA.

In returning from the hospital, more than an hour later,
Eomola took a different road, making a wider circuit
toward the river, which she reached at some distance from
the Ponte Vecchio. She turned her steps toward that
bridge, intending to hasten to San Stefano in search of
Baldassarre. She dreaded to know more about him, yet
she felt as if, in forsaking him, she would be forsaking
some near claim upon hqr.

But when she approached the meeting of the roads
where the Por Santa Maria would be on her right hand
and the Ponte Vecchio on her left, she found herself
involved in a crowd who suddenly fell on their knees; and
she immediately knelt with them. The Cross was jDass-
ing — the Great Cross of the Duomo — which headed the
procession. Eomola was later than she liad expected to
be, and now she must wait till the procession had passed.
As she rose from her knees, when the Cross had disap-
pered, the return to a standing posture, with nothing to
do but gaze, made her more conscious of her fatigue than
she had been while she had been walking and occupied.
A shopkeeper by her side said, —

356

KOMOLA.

^ /'Maclonuii Eomola, you will be weary of standing:
Gian Fantoni will be glad to give you a seat in his house.
Here is his door close at hand. Let me open it for you.
What! he loves God and the Frate as we do. His house is
yours."

Romola was accustomed now to be addressed in this
fraternal way by ordinary citizens, whose faces Avere familiar
to her from her having seen them constantly in the Duomo.
The idea of home had come to be identified for her less
with the house in the Via de Bardi, where she sat in
frequent loneliness, than with the towered circuit of
Florence, where there was hardly a turn of the streets at
which she was not greeted with looks of appeal or of
friendliness. She was glad enough to pass through the
open door on her right hand and be led by the fraternal
hose-vender to an upstairs-window, where a stout woman
with three children, all in the plain garb of Piagnoni, made
a place for her with much reverence above the bright
hanging draperies. From this corner station she could see,
not only the procession pouring in solemn slowness between
the lines of houses on the Ponte Vecchio, but also the
river and the Lung Arno on toward the bridge of the Santa
Trinita.

In sadness and in stillness came the slow procession.
Not even a wailing chant broke the silent appeal for
mercy: there was only the tramp of footsteps, and the
faint sweep of woolen garments. They were young foot-
steps that were passing when Romola first looked from the
window— a long train of the Florentine youth, bearing
high in the midst of them the white image of the youthful
Jesus, with a golden glory above his head, standing by the
tall cross where the thorns and nails lay ready.

After that train of fresh beardless faces came the mys-
terious-looking Companies of Discipline, bound by secret
rules to self-chastisement, and devout praise, and special
acts of piety; all wearing a garb which concealed the whole
head and face except the eyes. Every one knew that these
mysterious forms were Florentine citizens of various rank,
who might be seen at ordinary times going about the busi-
ness of the shop, the counting-house, or the State; but no
member now was discernible as son, husband, or father.
They had dropped their personality, and walked as svm-
bols of a common vow. Each company had its color and
its badge, but the garb of all was a complete shroud, and
left no expression but that of fellowship.

THE U^'SEEX MADOXXA. 357

In comparisou with them, the multitude of monks
seemed to be strongly distinguished individuals, in sjjite of
the common tonsure and the common frock. First came a
■white stream of reformed Benedictines; and then a much
longer stream of the Frati Minori, or Franciscans, in that age
all clad in gra}-, with the knotted cord round tlieir waists,
and some of them with the zoccoli, or wooden sandals,
below their bare feet; — perhaps the most numerous order
ill Florence, owning many zealous members who loved
mankind and hated the Dominicans. And after the gray
came the black of the August inians of San SjDirito, with
more cultured human faces above it — men who had inher-
ited the library of Boccaccio, and had made the most
learned company in Florence when learning was rarer;
then the white over dark of the Carmelites; and then
again the unmixed black of the Servites, that famous
Florentine order founded by seven merchants who forsook
their gains to adore the Divine Mother.

And now the hearts of all on-lookers began to beat a
little faster, either with hatred or with love, for there was
a stream of black and white coming over the bridge — of
black mantles over white scapularies; and every one knew
that the Dominicans were coming. Those of Fiesole
passed first. One black mantle parted by white after
another, one tonsured head after another, and still expec-
tation was susjjended. They were very coarse mantles, all
of them, and many were threadbare, if not ragged; for the
Prior of San Marco had reduced the fraternities under his
rule to the strictest poverty and discipline. But in the
long line of black and white there was at last singled out a
nuintle only a little more worn than the rest, with a
tonsured head above it which might not have appeared
su2)remely remarkable to a stranger who had not seen it on
bronze medals, with the sword of God as its obverse; or
surrounded by an armed guard on the way to the Duomo;
or transfigured by the inward flame of the orator as it
looked round on a ra^^t multitude.

As the approach of Savonarola was discerned, none
dared conspicuously to break the stillness by a sound which
would rise above the solemn tramp of footsteps and the
faint sweep of garments, nevertheless his ear, as well as
other ears, caugTit a mingled sound of slow hissing that
longed to be curses, and murmurs that longed to be bless-
iii^'s. Perliaps it was iiie sense that tlie liis.~iiig predomi-
nated which made two or tiiree of his disciples in the fore-

358 ROMOLA.

ground of the crowd, at the meeting of the roads, fall on
their knees as if something divine were passing. The
movement of silent homage spread: it Avent along the
sides of the streets like a subtle shock, leaving some
unmoved, while it made the most bend the knee and boAv
the head. But the hatred, too, gathered a more intense
expression; and as Savonarola passed up the Por' Santa
Maria, Romola could see that some one at an upper win-
dow spat upon him.

Monks again — Frati Umiliati, or Humbled Brethren,
from Ognissanti, Avith a glorious tradition of being the
earliest Avorkers in the wool-trade; and again more monks —
Vallombrosan and other varieties of Benedictines, remind-
ing the instructed eye by niceties of form and color that
in ages of abuse, long ago, reformers had arisen avIjo had
marked a change of spirit by a change of garb; till at last
the shaven croAvns Avere at an end, and there came the
train of untonsured secular priests.

Then folloAved the twenty-one incorporated Arts of Flor-
ence in long array, with their banners floating ul:»ove them
in proud declaration that the bearers had their distinct
functions, from the bakers of bread to the judges and
notaries. And then all the secondary officers vt State,
beginning Avith the less and going on to the greater, till
the line of secularities Avas broken by the Canons of the
Duomo, carrying a sacred relic — the very head, enclosed
in silver, of San Zenobio, immortal bishop of Florence,
whose virtues were held to have saved the city perhaps a
thousand years before.

Here Avas the nucleus of the procession. Behind the
relic came the archbishop in gorgeous cope, Avith canopy
held above him; and after him the mysterious hidden
image — hidden first by rich curtains of brocade enclosing
an outer painted tabernacle, but within this, by the more
ancient tabernacle Avhicli had never been opened in the
memory of living men, or the fathers of living men. In
that inner shrine Avas the image of the Pitying Mother,
found ages ago in the soil of L'lmpruntta, uttering a cry
as the spade struck it. Hitherto the unseen image had
hardly ever been carried to the Duomo without having rich
gifts borne before it. There Avas no reciting the list of
precious offerings made by emulous men and communities,
especially of veils and curtains and mantles. But the
richest of all these, it Avas said, had been given by a poor
abbess and her nuns, Avho, having no money to buy mate-

THE UXSEEX MADOXNA. 359

rials, wove a mantle of gold orocade with their prayers,
embroidered it and adorned it Avith their prayers, and,
finally, saw their work presented to the Blessed Virgin in
the great Piazza by two beautiful youths who spread out
white wings and vanished in the blue.

But to-day there were no gifts carried before the taber-
nacle: no donations were to be given to-day except to the
poor. That had been the advice of Fra Girolamo, whose
jDreaching never insisted on gifts to the invisible powers,
but only on help to visible need; and altars had been raised
at various points in front of the churches, on which the
oblations for the poor were deposited. Not even a torch
was carried. Surely the hidden Mother cared less for
.torches and brocade than for the wail of the hungry people.
Florence was in extremity: she had done her utmost, and
could only wait for something divine that was not in her
own power.

The Frate in the torn mantle had said that help would
cjrtainly come, and many of the faint-hearted were cling-
ing more to their faith in the Frate's word, than to their
faith in the virtues of the unseen Image. But there were
not a few of the fierce-hearted who thought with secret
rejoicing that the Frate's word might be proved false.

Slowly the tabernacle moved forward, and knees were
bent. There was a profound stillness; for the train of
priests and chaplains from LTmpruneta stirred no passion
in the on-lookers. The procession was about to close with
the Priors and the G-onf aloniere : the long train of com-
panies and symbols, which have their silent music and stir
the mind as a chorus stirs it, was passing out of sight, and
now a faint yearning hope was all that struggled with the
accustomed despondency,

Romola, whose beart had been swelling, half with fore-
boding, half with that enthusiasm of fellowship which the
life of the last two years had made as habitual to her as
the consciousness of costume to a vain and idle woman,
gave a deep sigh, as at the end of some long mental
tension, and remained on her knees for very languor;
when suddenly there flashed from between the houses on
to the distant bridge something bright-colored. In the
instant, Romola started up and stretched out her arms,
leaning from the window, while the black drapery fell
from her head, and the golden gleam of her hair and the
flush in her face seemed the effect of one illumination. A
shout arose in the same instant; the last troops of the pro-

360 ROMOLA.

cession paused, and all faces were turned toward the
distant bridge.

But the bridge was passed now: the horseman was press-
ing at full gallop along by the Arno; the sides of his bay
horse, just streaked with foam, looked all white from
swiftness; his cap was flying loose by his red becchetto,
and he waved an olive branch in his hand. It was a
messenger — a messenger of good tidings ! The blessed
olive branch spoke afar off. But the impatient people
could not wait. They rushed to meet the on-comer, and
siezed his horse's rein, pushing and trampling.

And now Romola could see that the horseman was her
husband, who had been sent to Pisa, a few days before on
a private embassy. The recognition brought no new flash
of joy into her eyes. She had checked her first impulsive-
attitude of expectation; but her governing anxiety was still
to know what news of relief had come for Florence.

''Good news!" "Best news!" "News to be paid with
hose {novelle da calze)\" were the vague answers with
which Tito met the importunities of the crowd, until he
had succeeded in pushing on his horse to the spot at the
meeting of the ways where the Gonfaloniere and the
Priors were awaiting him. There he paused, and, bowing-
low, said —

"Magnificent Signori! I have to deliver to you the
joyful news that the galleys from France, laden with corn
and men, have arrived safely in the port of Leghorn, by
favor of a strong wind, which kept the enemy's fleet at a
distance."

The words had no sooner left Tito's lips than they
seemed to vibrate up the streets. A great shout rang
througli the air, and ruslied along the river: and then
another, and another; and the shouts were heard spreading
along the line of procession toward the Duomo; and then
there were fainter answering shouts, like the intermediate
plash of distant waves in a great lake whose waters obey
one impulse.

For some minutes there was no attempt to speak
further: the Signoria themselves lifted up their caps, and
stood bareheaded in the presence of a rescue which had
come from outside the limit of their power — from that
region of trust and resignation which has been in all ages
called divine.

At last, as the signal was given to move forward, Tito
said, with a smile —

THE VISIBLE MADUXNA. 361

''I ought to say, that any hose to be bestowed by ^^^
Magnificent Signoria in reward of thesp ti'^iings are due,
not to me, but to annthw «iaii who had ridden hard to
bring them. «ii(l would have been here in my pkce if his
horse J^f^J not broken down just before he reached Signa.
Meo di Sasso will doubtless be here in an hour or two, and
may all the more justly claim the glory of the messenger,
because he has had the chief labor and has lost the chief
delight."

It was a graceful way of putting a necessary statement,
and after a "word of reply from the Proposto, or spokesman
of the Signoria, this dignified extremity of the procession
passed on, and Tito turned his horse's head to follow in
its train, while the great bell of the Palazzo Vecchio was
already iDeginning to swing, and give a louder voice to the
people's joy.

In that moment, when Tito's attention had ceased to be
imperatively directed, it might have been expected that
he would look round and recognize Romola; but he was
apparently engaged with his cap, which, now the eager
people were leading his horse, he was able to seize and
place on his head, while his right hand was still encum-
bered by the olive branch. He had a becoming air of
lassitude after his exertions: and Eomola, instead of
making any efEort to be recognized by him, threw her
black drapery over her head again, and remained perfectly
quiet. Yet she felt almost sure that Tito had seen her;
he had the power of seeing everything without seeming to
see it.

CHAPTER XLIV.

THE VISIBLE MADOXNA.

The crowd had no sooner passed onward than Romola
descended to the street, and hastened to the steps of San
Stefano. Cecco had been attracted with the rest toward
the Piazza, and she found Baldassare standing alone against
the church door, with the horn-cup in his hand, waiting
for her. There was a striking change in him: the blank,
dreamy glance of a half-returned consciousness had given
place to a fierceness which, as she advanced and spoke to

362 ROMOLA.

him, flashed upon her as if she had been its object. It was
Y^'^ glance of caged fury that sees its prey passing safe
beyond tUe b<u,:>. ■■■ ^ x ©

Romola started as the gianue wao tnrned on her but her
immediate thought was that he had seen Tito. And as slie
felt the look of hatred grating on her, something lii^e a
hope arose that this man might be the criminal, and thu'i
her husband might not have been guilty toward him. If
she could learn that now, by bringing Tito face to face
with him, and have her mind set at rest!

"If you will come with me," she said, "I can give you
shelter and food nntil you are quite rested and strong.
Will you come?

"Yes," said Baldassarre, "I shall be glad to get my
strength. I want to get my strength," he repeated, as if
he were muttering to himself, rather than speaking to her.
"Come!" she said, inviting him to walk by her side,
and taking the way by the Arno toward the Ponte Ruba-
conte as the more private road.

"1 think you are not a Florentine," she said, presently,
as they turned on to the bridge.

_ He looked round at her without speaking. His suspi-
cious caution was more strongly upon him than usual, just
now that the fog of confusion and oblivion was made
denser by bodily feebleness. But slie was looking at him
too, and there was something in her gentle eyes which at
last compelled him to answer her. But he answered
cautiously —

"No, I am no Florentine; I am a lonely man."
She observed his reluctance to speak to her, and dared
not question him further, lest he should desire to quit her.
As she glanced at him from time to time, her mind was
busy with thoughts which quenched the faint hope that
there was nothing painful to be revealed about her husband.
If this old man had been in the wrong, where was the
cause for dread and secrecy?

They walked on in silence till they reached the entrance
into the Via de Bardi, and Romola noticed that he turned
and looked at her Avith a sudden movement as if some
shock had passed through him. A few moments after,
she paused at the half-open door of the court and turned
toward him.

" Ah! " he said, not waiting for her to speak, " you are
his wife."

" Whose wife?" said Homola.

THE VISIBLE MADONNA. 363'

It would have been impossible for Baldassarre to recall
any name at that moment. The very force with which
the image of Tito pressed upon him seemed to expel any
verbal sign. He made no answer, but looked at her with
strange fixedness.

She opened the door wide and showed the court covered
with straw, on which lay four or five sick people, while
some little children crawled or sat on it at their ease — tiny
pale creatures, biting straws and gurgling.

" If you will come in,^' said Eomola, tremulously, " I
will find you a comfortable place, and bring you some
more food."

''No, I will not come in," said Baldassarre. But he
stood still, arrested by the burden of impressions under
which his mind was too confused to choose a course.

"Can I do nothing for you?" said Eomola. " Let me
give you some money that you may buy food. It will be
more plentiful soon."

She had put her hand into her scarsella as she spoke,
and held out her palm with several grossi in it. She pur-
posely offered him more than she would have given to any
other man in the same circumstances. He looked at the
coins a little while, and then said —

''Yes, I will take them."

She poured the coins into his palm, and he grasped them
tightly.

''Tell me," said Eomola, almost beseechingly. "What
shall you "

But Baldassarre had turned away from her, and was
walking again toward the bridge. Passing from it straight
on up the Via del Fosso, he came upon the shop of ]^iccol6
Caparra, and turned toward it without a jjause, as if it had
been the very object of his search. Niccolo was at that
moment in procession with the armorers of Florence, and
there was only one apprentice in the shop. But there
were all sorts of weapons in abundance hanging there, and
Baldassarre's eyes discerned what he was more hungry for
than for bread. Niccolo himself would probably have
refused to sell anything that might serve as a weapon to
this man with signs of the prison on him; but the aj^pren-
tice, less observant and scrupulous, took three grossi
for a sharp hunting-knife without any hesitation. It was
a conveniently small weapon, which Baldassarre could
easily thrust within the breast of his tunic, and he walked
on, feeling stronger. That sharp edge might give deadli'

364 ROMOLA.

ness to the thrust of an aged arm : at least it was a com-
panion, it was a power in league with him, even if it failed.
It would break against armor, but was the armor sure to
be always there? In those long months while vengeance
had lain in prison, baseness hud perhaps become forgetful
and secure. The knife had been bought with the traitor's
own money. That was just. Before he took the money,
he had felt what he should do with it — buy a weapon.
Yes, and, if possible, food too; food to nourish the arm
that would grasp the weapon, food to nourish the body
which was the temple of vengeance. When he had had
enough bread, he should be able to think and act — to
think first how he could hide himself, lest Tito should
have him dragged away again.

With that idea of hiding in his mind, Baldassarre
turned up the narrowest streets, bought himself some
meat and bread, and sat down under the first loggia to
eat. The bells that swung out louder and louder peals
of joy, laying hold of him and making him vibrate along
Avith all the air, seemed to him simply part of that strong
Avorld which was against him.

Eomola had watched Baldassarre until he had disap-
peared round the turning into the Piazza de Mozzi, half
feeling that his departure was a relief, half reproaching
herself for not seeking with more decision to know the
truth about him, for not assuring herself whether there
were any guiltless misery in his lot Avhich she was not
helpless to relieve. Yet what could she have done if the
truth had proved to be the burden of some painful secret
about her husband, in addition to the anxieties that already
weighed upon her? Surely a wife was permitted to desire
iguorance of a husband's wrong-doing, since she alone
must not protest and warn men against him. Bat that
thought stirred too many intricate fibres of feeling to be
pursued now in her weariness. It was a time to rejoice,
since help had come to Florence; and she turned into the
court to tell the good news to her patients on their straw
beds.

She closed the door after her, lest the bells should drown
her voice, and then throwing the black drapery from her
head, that the women might see her better, she stood in
the midst and told them that corn was coming, and that
the bells were ringing for gladness at the news. They all
sat up to listen, while the children trotted or crawled
toward her, and pulled her black skirts, as if they were

THE VISIBLE MADONNA. 365

impatient at being all that long way off her face. She
yielded to them, weary as she was, and sat down on the
straw, while the little pale things peeped into her basket
and pulled her hair down, and the feeble voices around
her said, " The Holy Virgin be praised!" " It was the pro-
cession!" "The Mother of God has had pity on us!"

At last Eomola rose from the heap of straw, too tired to
try and smile any longer, saying as she turned up the
stone steps —

"1 will come by-and-by, to bring you your dinner."

"Bless you, madonna! bless you!" said the faint chorus,
in much the same tone as that in which they had a few
minutes before praised and thanked the unseen Madonna.

Romola cared a great deal for that music. She had no
innate taste for tending the sick and clothing the ragged,
like some women to whom the details of such work are wel-
come in themselves, simply as an occupation. Her early
training had kept her aloof from such womanly labors; and
if she had not brought to them the inspiration of her deepest
feelings, they would have been irksome to her. But they
had come to be the one unshaken resting-place of her mind,
the one narrow pathway on which the light fell clear. If
the gulf between herself and Tito which only gathered a
more perceptible wideness from her attempts to bridge it
by submission, brought a doubt whether, after all, the
bond to which she had labored to be true might not itself
be false — if she came away from her confessor, Fra Salves-
tro, or from some contact with the disciples of Savonarola
amongst whom she worshipped, with a sickening sense that
these people were miserably narrow, and with an almost
impetuous reaction toward her old contempt for their
superstition — she found herself recovering a firm footing
in her works of womanly sympathy. Whatever else made
her doubt, the help she gave to her fellow-citizens made
her sure that Fra Girolamo had been right to call her back.
According to his unforgotten words, her place had not been
empty: it had been filled with her love and her labor.
Florence had had need of her, and the more her own sor-
row pressed upon her, the more gladness she felt in the
memories, stretching through the two long years, of hours
and moments in Avhich she had lightened the burden of
life to others. All that ardor of her nature which could
no longer spend itself in the woman's tenderness for father
and husband, had transformed itself mto an enthusiasm of
sympathy with the general life. She had ceased to think

366 ROMOLA.

that her own lot could be happy— had ceased to think of
haiDpiness at all: the one end of" her life seemed to her to
be the diminishing of sorrow.

Her enthusiasm was continually stirred to fresh vigor
by the influence of Savonarola. In spite of the weari-
some visions and allegories from which she recoiled in
disgust when they came as stale repetitions from other
lips than his, her strong affinity for his passionate sympa-
thy and the splendor of his aims had lost none of its power.
His burning indignation against the abuses and oppres-
sion that made the daily story of the Church and of
States had kindled the ready fire in her too. His special
care for liberty and purity of government in Florence,
with his constant reference of this immediate object to
the wider end of a universal regeneration, had created in
her a new consciousness of the great drama of human
existence in which her life was a part; and through her
daily helpful contact with the less fortunate of her fellow-
citizens this new consciousness became something stronger
than a vague sentiment; it grew into a more and more
definite motive of self-denying practice. She thought
little about dogmas, and shrank from reflecting closely on
the Frate's prophecies of the immediate scourge and closely-
following regeneration. She had submitted her mind to
his and had entered into communion with the Church,
(because in this way she had found an immediate satisfaction
for moral needs which all the previous culture and experi-
ence of her life had left hungering. Fra Girolamo's voice
had waked in her mind a reason for living, apart from
personal enjoyment and personal affection; but it was a
reason that seemed to need feeding with greater forces
than she possessed within herself, and lier submissive use
of all offices of the Church was simply a watching and
waiting if by any means fresh strength might come. The
23ressing problem for Romola just then was not to settle
questions of controversy, but to keep alive that flame of
unselfish emotion by which a life of sadness might still be
a life of active love.

Her trust in Savonarola^s nature as greater than her own
made a large part of the strength she had found. And
the trust was not to be lightly shaken. It is not force of
intellect which causes ready repulsion from the aberration
and eccentricities of greatness, any more than it is force of
vision that causes the eye to explore the warts on a face
bright with human expression; it is simply the negation of

AT THE barber's SHOP. 367

high sensibilities. Romohi was so deeply moved by the
grand energies of Savonarola's nature that she found her-
self listening patiently to all dogmas and prophecies, when
they came in the vehicle of his ardent faith and believing
utterance. *

No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for
whom it can feel trust and reverence. Romola's trust in
Savonarola was something like a rope suspended securely
by her path, making her step elastic while she grasped it;
if it were suddenly removed, no firmness of the ground she
trod could save her from staggermg, or perhaps from falling.

CHAPTER XLV.

AT THE BARBER SHOP.

After that welcome appearance as the messenger with
the olive-branch, which was an unpromised favor of fort-
une, Tito had other commissions to fulfill of a more
premeditated character. He paused at the Palazzo Vec-
chio, and awaited there the return of the Ten, who man-
aged external and war affairs, that he might duly deliver
to them the results of his private mission to Pisa, intended
as a preliminary to an avowed embassy of which Bernardo
Rucellai was to" be the head, with the object of coming, if
possible, to a pacific understanding with the Emperor
Maximilian and the League.

Tito's talents for diplomatic work had been well ascer-
tained, and as he gave with fullness and precision the
results of his inquiries and interviews, Bernardo del Nero,
who was at that time one of the Ten, could not withhold
his admiration. He would have withheld it if he could;
for his original dislike of Tito had returned, and become
stronger, since the sale of the library. Romola had never
uttered a word to her godfather on the circumstances of
the sale, and Bernardo had understood her silence as a
prohibition to him to enter on the subject, but he felt sure

cle.

have i.v^^ ..vx^^v ...w^v. „ — , , - , . , . J,

more than they who believe, because it is one thing to hear him who inwardly
feels these things, and another to hear him who feels them not : * * * and
therefore it is well said by St. Jerome, ' Habet nescio quid latentis energias
viviB vocis actus, et in aures discipuli de auctoris ore transfusa fortis
sonat,' "

308 ROMOLA.

that the breach of her father's wish had been a blighting
grief to her, and the old man's observant eyes discerned
other indications that her married life was not happy.

"Ah/' he said inwardly, "that doubtless is the reason
she has taken to listening to Fra Girolamo.. and going
amongst the Piagnoni^ which I never expected from her.
These women, if they are not happy, and have no children,
must either take to folly or to some overstrained religion
that makes them think they've got all heaven's work on
their shoulders. And as for my poor child Eomola, it is
as I always said — the cramming with Latin and Greek has
left her as much a woman as if she had done nothing all
day but prick her fingers with the needle. And this hus-
band of hers, who gets employed everywhere, because he's
a tool with a smooth handle, I wish Tornabuoni and the
rest may not find their fingers cut. Well, well, solco, torto,
sacco dritto — many a full sack comes from a crooked fur-
row; and he who will be captain of none but honest men
will have small hire to pay."

With this long-established conviction that there could
be no moral sifting of political agents, the old Florentine
abstained from all interference in Tito's disfavor. Apart
from what must be kept sacred and private for Eomola's sake,
Bernardo had nothing direct to allege against the useful
Greek, except that he was a Greek, and that he, Bernardo,
did not like him; for the doubleness of feigning attachment
to the government, while at heart a Medicean, was com-
mon to Tito with more than half the Medicean party. He
only feigned with more skill than the rest: that was all.
So Bernardo was simply cold to Tito, who returned the
coldness with a scrupulous, distant respect. And it was
still the notion in Florence that the old tie between Ber-
nardo and Bardo made any service done to Eomola's hus-
band an acceptable homage to her godfather.

After delivering himself of his charge at the Old Palace,
Tito felt that the avowed official work of the day was done.
He Avas tired and adust with long riding; but he did not
go home. There were certain things in his scarsclla and
on his mind, from whicli he wished to free himself as soon
as possible, but the opportunities must be found so skill-
fully tliat they must not seem to be sought. He walked
from the Palazzo in a sauntering fashion toward the Piazza
del Duomo. The procession was at an end now, but the
bells were still ringing, and the people were moving about
the streets restlessly, longing for some more definite vent

AT THE barber's SHOP. 369

to their joy. If the Frate could have stood up in the
great Piazza and preached to them, they might have been
satisfied, but now, in spite of the new discipline which
declared Christ to be the special King of the Florentines
and required all pleasures to be of a Christian sort, there
was a secret longing in many of the youngsters who shouted
"Viva Gesul" for a little vigorous stone-throwing in sign
of thankfulness.

Tito, as he passed along, could not escape being recog-
nized by some as the welcome bearer of the olive-branch, and
could only rid himself of an inco»venient ovation, chiefly
in the form of eager questions, by telling those who pressed
on him tliat Meo di Sasso, the true messenger from Leg-
horn, must now be entering, and might certainly be met
toward the Porta San Frediano. He could tell much more
than Tito knew.

Freeing himself from importunities in this adroit man-
ner, he made his way to the Piazza del Duomo, casting his
long eyes round tlie space with an air of the utmost care-
lessness, but really seeking to detect some presence which
might furnish him with one of his desired opportunities.
The fact of the procession having terminated at the Duomo
made it probable tjiat there would be more than the usual
concentration of loungers and talkers in the Piazza and
round Nello's shop. It was as he expected. There was a
grou]) leaning against the rails near the north gates of the
Baptistery, so exactly what he sought, that he looked more
indifferent than ever, and seemed to recognize the tallest
member of the gioup entirely by chance as he had half
passed him, just turning his head to give him a slight
greeting, while he tossed the end of his hecchetto over his left
shoulder.

Yet the tall, broad-shouldered personage greeted in that
slight way looked like one who had considerable claims.
He wore a richly-embroidered tunic, with a great show of
linen, after the newest French mode, and at his belt there
hung a sword and poniard of fine workmanship. His hat,
with a red plume in it, seemed a scornful protest against the
gravity of Florentine costume, which had been exagger-
ated to the utmost under the influence of the Piagnoni.
Certain undefinable indications of youth made the breadth
of his face and the large diameter of his waist appear the
more emphatically a stamp of coarseness, and his eyes
had that rude desecrating stare at all men and things
34

370 KOMOLA.

which to a refined mind is as intolerable as a bad odor or a
flaring light.

He and his companions, also 3^oung men dressed expen-
sively and wearing arms, were exchanging jokes with that
sort of ostentatious laughter which implies a desire to
prove that the laughter is not mortified though some
people might suspect it. There were good reasons for
such a suspicion; for this broad-shouldered man with a
red feather was Dolfo S]3ini, leader of the Compagnacci, or
Evil Companions — that is to say, of all the dissolute young
men belonging to the old aristocratic i^arty, enemies of
the Mediceans, enemies of the popular government, but
still more bitter enemies of Savonarola. Dolfo Spini,
heir of the great house with the loggia, over the bridge of
the Santa Trinita, had organized these young men into an
armed band, as sworn champions of extravagant suppers
and all the pleasant sins of the flesh, against reforming
pietists who threatened to make the world chaste and
temperate to so intolerable a degree that there M^ould soon
be no reason for living, except the extreme uni)leasantness
of the alternative. Up to this very morning he liad been
loudly declaring that Florence was given up to famine and
ruin entirely through its blind adherence to the advice of
the Frate, and that there could be no.salvation for Flor-
ence but in joining the League and driving the Frate out
of the city — sending him to Eome, in fact, whither he
ought to have gone long ago in obedience to the summons
of the Pope. It was suspected, therefore, that Messer
Dolfo Spini's heart was not aglow with j)ure joy at the
unexpected succors which had come in apjiarent fulfillment
of the Frate's prediction, and the laughter, which Avas
ringing out afresh as Tito joined the group at ^i'"ello's door,
did not serve to dissipate the suspicion. For leaning
against the door-post in the centre of the group was a
close-shaven, keen-eyed personage, named Xiccolo Mac-
chiavelli, who, young as he was, had penetrated all the
small secrets of egoism.

" Messer Dolfo's head," he was saying, "is more of a
pumpkin than I thought. I mciisure men's dullness by
the devices they trust in for deceiving others. Your dull-
est animal of all is he who grins and sa3-s he doesn^t mind
just after he has had his shins kicked. If I were a trifle
duller now," he went on, smiling as the circle opened to
admit Tito, '' I should pretend to be fond of this Melema,
who has got a secretaryship (hut would exactly suit me — as

AT THE BAKBEP/S SHOP. 371

if Latin ill-paid conld love better Latin that's better paid!
Melema, you are a pestiferously clever fellow, very much
in my way, and I'm sorry to hear you've had another piece
of good-luck to-day."

"Questionable luck, Niccolo," said Tito, touching him
on the shoulder in a friendly way; "I have got nothing
bv it yet but being laid hold of and breathed upon by
wool-beaters, when I am as soiled and battered with ridmg
as a tahellario (letter-carrier) from Bologna."

"Ah! you want a touch of my art, Messer Oratore,^
said Xello, who had come forward at the sound of Tito's
voice; "your chin, I perceive, has j^esterday's crop upon
it. Come, come — consign yourself to the priest of all
tlie Muses. Sandro, quick with the lather!"

"In truth. Nello, that is jnst what I most desire at
this moment," said Tito, seating himself; " and that was
why I turned my steps toward thy shop, instead of going
home at once, when I had done my business at the

Palazzo. ' ,,11-

" Yes, indeed, it is not fitting that you should present
yourself to Madonna Romola with a rusty chin and a
tancrled zazzera. Nothing that is not dainty ought to
approach the Florentine lily; though I see her constantly
o-oing about like a sunbeam amongst the rags that line
our corners — if indeed she is not more like a moonbeam
now, for I thought vesterday, when I met her, that she
looked as pale and worn as that fainting Madonna of Fra
Giovanni's. You must see to it, my bel erudito: she keeps
too many fasts and vigils in your atjsence."

Tito gave a melancholy shrug. "It is too true, A'ello.
She has been depriving herself of half her proper food
every day during this famine. But what can I do? Her
mind has been set all aflame. A husband's influence is
powerless against the Frate's." , , , , ^, - i. .i

" As every other influence is likely to be, that ot the
Holy Father^included," said Domenico Cennini, one of the
group at the door, who had turned in with Tito. "I
don't know whether you have gathered anything at Fisa
about the wav the wind sits at Rome, Melema?" _

" Secrets of the council chamber, Messer Domenico!
said Tito, smiling and opening his palms in a deprecatory
manner. " An envoy must be as dumb as a father con-

f 6SS01'

"Certainly, certainlv." said Cennini. "I ask for no
breach of that rule. Well, my belief is, that if his Holi-

372 EOMOLA.

ness were to drive Fra Girolamo to extremit}', the Frate
would move heaven and earth to get a General Council of
the Church — ay, and would get it too; and I, for one,
should not be sorry, though I'm no Piagnone/'

" With leave of your greater experience, Messer
Domenico," said Macchiavelli, "I must differ from you —
not in your wish to see a General Council, which might
reform the Church, but in your belief that the Frate will
checkmate his Holiness. The Frate's game is an impos-
sible one. If he had contented himself with preaching
against the vices of Rome, and with prophesying that in
some way, not mentioned, Italy would be scourged, depend
upon it Pope Alexander would have allowed him to spend
his breath in that way as long as he could find hearers.
Such spiritual blasts as those knock no walls down. But
the Frate wants to be something more than a spiritual
trum])et: he wants to be a lever, and what is more, he is
a lever. He wants to spread the doctrine of Christ by
maintaining a popular government in Florence, and the
Pojie, as I know, on the best authority, has private views
to the contrary."

" Then Florence will stand by the Frate," Cennini broke
in with some fervor. "I myself should prefer that he
would let his prophesying alone, but if our freedom to choose
our own government is to be attacked — I am an obedient
son of the Church, but I would vote for resisting Pope
Alexander the Sixth, as our forefathers resisted Pope
Gregory the Eleventh."

" But pardon me, Messer Domenico," said Macchiavelli,
sticking his thumbs into his belt, and sj)eaking with that
cool enjoyment of exposition which surmounts every other
force in discussion. "Have you correctly seized the
Prate's position? How is it that he has become a lever,
and made himself worth attacking by an acute man like
his Holiness? Because he has got the ear of the jieople:
because he gives them threats and promises, Avhich they
believe come straight from God, not only about hell, pur-
gatory, and paradise, but about Pisa and our Great
Council. But let events go against him, so as to shake
the people's faith, and the cause of his power will be the
cause of his fall. He is accumulating three sorts of hatred
on his head — the hatred of average mankind against every
one who wants to lay on them a strict yoke of virtue; the
hatred of the stronger powers in Italy who want to farm
Florence for their own purposes; and the hatred of the

AT THE barber's SHOP. 373

people, to whom he has ventured to promise good in this
world, instead of contining his promises to tlie next. If a
prophet is to keep his power, he must be a propliet like
Mahomet, with an army at his back, that when the
people's faith is fainting it may be frightened into life
again."

''Eather sum up the three sorts of hatred in one," said
Francesco Cei, impetuously, " and say he has won the
hatred of all men who have sense and honesty, by invent-
ing hypocritical lies. His proper place is among the false
prophets in the Inferno, who walk with their heads turned
hind foremost."

" You are too angry, my Francesco," said Macchiavelli,
smiling; "you poets are apt to cut the clouds in your
wrath. I am no votary of the Frate's, and would not lay
down my little finger for his veracity. But veracity is a
plant of paradise, and the seeds have never flourished
beyond the walls. You, yourself, my Francesco, tell
poetical lies only; partly compelled by the poet's fervor,
partly to please your audience; but you object to lies in
prose. Well, the Frate differs from you as to the boundary
of poetry, that's all. When he gets into the pulpit of the
Duomo, he has the fervor within him, and without him he
has the audience to please. Ecco ! "

" You are somewhat lax there, Niccolo," said Cennini,
gravely. ''I myself believe in the Frate's integrity, though
I don't believe in his prophecies, and as long as his
integrity is not disproved, we have a popular party strong
enough to protect him and resist foreign interference."

"A party that seems strong enough," said Macchiavelli,
with a shrug, and an almost imperceptible glance toward
Tito, who was abandoning himself with much enjoyment
to ^"ello's combing and scenting. "But how many
Mediceans are there among you? How many who will
not be turned round by a private grudge?"

"As to the Mediceans," said Cennini, "I believe there
is very little genuine feeling left on behalf of the Medici.
Who would risk much for Piero de Medici? A few old
staunch friends, perhaps, like Bernardo del Xero; but
even some of those most connected with the family are
hearty friends of the popular government, and would
exert themselves for the Frate. ' I was talking to Gian-
nozzo Pucci only a little while ago, and I am convinced
there's nothing he would set his face against more^than
against any attempt to alter the new order of things."

374 ROMOLA.

''You are right there, Messer Domenico," said Tito,
with a laugliing meaning in liis eyes, as he rose from the
shaving-cliair; '^and I fancy the tender passion came in
aid of hard theory there. I am persuaded there was some
jealousy at the bottom of Giannozzo's alienation from
Piero de Medici; else so amiable a creature as he would
never feel the bitterness he sometimes allows to escape him
in that quarter. He was in the procession with you, I
suppose ? "

'•'No," said Cennini; "he is at his villa — went there
three days ago."

Tito was settling his cap and glancing down at his
splashed hose as if he hardly heeded the answer. In
reality he had obtained a much-desired piece of informa-
tion. He had at that moment in his scarsella a crushed
gold ring which he had engaged to deliver to Giannozzo
Pucci. He had received it from an envoy of Pioro de
Medici, whom he had ridden out of his way to meet at
Certaldo on the Siena road. Since Pucci was not in the
town, he would send the ring by Fra Michele, a Carthu-
sian lay Brother in the service of the Mediceans, and the
receipt of that sign would bring Pucci back to hear the
verbal part of Tito's mission.

"Behold him I" said Nello, flourishing his Comb and
pointing it at Tito, "the handsomest scholar in the world
or in the wolds,* now he has passed through my hands!
A trifle thinner in the face, though, than when he came
in his first bloom to Florence — eh? and, I vow, there are
some lines just faintly hinting themselves about your
mouth, Messer Oratore! Ah, mind is an enemy to beauty!
I myself was thought beautiful by the women at one
time — when I was in my swaddling-bands. But now —
oime! I carry my unwritten poems in cipher on my face!"

Tito, laughing with the rest as Nello looked at himself
tragically in the hand-mirror, made a sign of farewell to
the company generally, and took his departure.

"I'm of our old Piero di Cosimo's mind," said Fran-
cesco Cei. "I don't half like Melema. That trick of
smiling gets stronger than ever — no wonder he has lines
about the mouth."

" He's too successful," said Macchiavelli, playfully, " I'm
sure there's something wrong about him, else he wouldn't
have that secretaryship."

"He's an able man," said Cennini, in a tone of judicial

* "Del mondo o di maremraa."

AT THE BxVKBER's SHOP. 375

fairness, ''I and my brother have always found him use-
ful with our Greek sheets, and he gives great satisfaction
to the Ten. I like to see a young man work his way
upward by merit. And the secretary Scala, who befriended
him from the first, thinks highly of him still, I know."

" Doubtless," said a notary in the background. " He
writes Scala's official letters for him, or corrects them,
and gets well paid for it too."

" I wish Messer Bartolommeo would pay me to doctor his
gouty Latin,'' said Macchiavelli, with a shrug. ''Did he
tell you about the pay, 8er Oeceone, or was it Melema
himself?" he added, looking at the notary with a face
ironically innocent,

*' Melema? no, indeed," answered Ser Ceccone, " He
is as close as a nut. He never brags. That's why he's
employed everywhere. They say he's getting rich with
doing' all sorts of underhand work."

" It is a little too bad," said Macchiavelli, " and so many
able notaries out of employment!"

" Well, I must say I thought that was a nasty story a
year or two ago about the man who said he had stolen jew-
els," said Cei. " It got hushed up somehow: but I remem-
ber Piero di Cosimo said, at the time, he believed there
was something in it, for he saw Melema's face when the
man laid hold of him, and he never saw a visage so
'painted with fear,' as our sour old Dante says."

"Come, spit no more of that venom, Francesco," said
Nello, getting indignant, "else I shall consider it a public
duty to cut your hair awry the next time I get you under
my scissors. That story of the stolen jewels was a lie.
Bernardo Eucellai and the Magnificent Eight knew all
about it. The man was a dangerous madman, and he was
very properly kept out of mischief in prison. As for our
Piero di Cosimo, his wits are running after the wind of
Mongibello: he has such an extravagant fancy that he
would take a lizard for a crocodile. No: that story has
been dead and buried too long — our noses object to it."

"It is true," said Macchiavelli. "You forget the dan-
ger of the precedent, Francesco. The next mad beggar-
man may accuse you of stealing his verses, or me, God
help me! of stealing his coppers. Ah!" he went on,
turning toward the door, " Dolfo Spini has carried his red
feather out of the Piazza. That captain of swaggerers
would like the Republic to lose Pisa Just for the chance
of seeing the people tear the frock off the Prate's back.

310 KOMOLA.

With your pardon, Francesco — I know he is a friend of
yours— there are few things I should like better than to
see him play the part of Capo d'Oca, who went out to the
tournament blowing his trumpets and returned with them
in a bag."

CHAPTER XLVI.

BY A STEEET LAMP.

That evening, when it was dark and threatening rain,
Romola, returning with Maso and the lantern by her side,
fr(mi the hospital of San Matteo, which she had visited
after vespers, encountered her husband just issuing from
the monastery of San Marco. Tito, who had gone out
again shortly after his arrival in the Via de Bardi, and had
seen little of Eomola during the day, immediately pro-
posed to accompany her home, dismissing Maso, whose
short steps annoyed him. It was only usual for him to
pay her such an official attention when it was obviously
demanded from him. Tito and Eomola never jarred,
never remonstrated with each other. They were too hope-
lessly alienated in their inner life ever to have that contest
which is an elfort toward agreement. They talked of all
affairs, public and private, with careful adiierence to an
adopted course. If Tito wanted a supper prepared in the
old library, now pleasantly furnished as a banqueting-
room, Romola assented, and saw that everything needful
was done: and Tito, on his side, left her entirely uncon-
trolled in her daily habits, accepting the help she offered
him in transcribing or making digests, and in return meet-
ing her conjectured want of supplies for her charities.
Yet he constantly, as on this very morning, avoided
exchanging glances with her; affected to believe that she
was out of tlie house, in order to avoid seeking her in her
own room; and playfully attrilnited to her a perpetual
preference of solitude to his society.

In t'he first ardor of her self-conquest, after she had
renounced her resolution of flight, Romola had made many
timid efforts toward the return of a frank relation between
them. But to her such a relation could only come by
open speech about their differences, and the attempt to
arrive at a moral understanding; while Tito could only be

BY jl street lamp. 377

saved from alienation from her by such a recovery of her
effusive tenderness as would have presupposed oblivion of
their differences. He cured for no explanation between
them; he felt any thorough explanation impossible: he
would have cared to have Romola fond again, and to her,
fondness was impossible. She could be submissive and
gentle, she could repress any sign of repulsion; but tender-
ness was not to be feigned. She was helplessly conscious
of the result: her husband was alienated from her.

It was an additional reason why she should be carefully
kept outside of secrets which he would in no case have
chosen to communicate to her. With regard to his political
action he sought to convince her that he considered the cause
of the Medici hopeless; and that on that practical ground,
as well as in theory, he heartily served the j^opular govern-
ment, in which she had now a warm interest. But impres-
sions subtle as odors made her uneasy about his relations
with San Marco. She was painfully divided between the
dread of seeing any evidence to arouse her suspicions, and
the impulse to watch lest any harm should come that she
might have arrested.

As they walked together this evening, Tito said — '''The
business of the day is not yet quite ended for me. I shall
conduct you to our door, my Romola, and then I must
fulfill another commission, which will take me an hour,
perhaps, before I can return and rest, as I verv much need
to do."

And then he talked amusingly of what he had seen at
Pisa, until they were close upon a loggia, near which there
hung a lamp before a picture of the Virgin. The street
was a quiet one, and hitherto they had passed few people;
but now there was a sound of many approaching footstej^s
and confused voices.

" We shall not get home without a wetting, unless we
take shelter under this convenient loggia," Tito said,
hastily, hurrying Romola, with a slightly startled move-
ment, up the step of the loggia.

" Surely it is useless to wait for this small drizzling
rain," said Romola, in surprise.

'"Ko: I felt it becoming heavier. Let us wait a little."
With that wakefulness to the faintest indication which
belongs to a mind habitually in a state of caution, Tito
had detected by the glimmer of the lamp that the leader
of the advancing group wore a red feather and a glittering
sword-hilt — in fact, was almost the last person in tlie world

378 ROMOLA.

he would have chosen to meet at this hour with Romola
by his side. He had ah-eady during the day had one
momentous interview with Dolfo Spini, and the business
he had spoken of to Romohi as yet to be done was a second
interview with that personage, a sequence of the visit he
had paid at San Marco. Tito, by a long-preconcerted plan,
had been the bearer of letters to Savonarola — carefully-
forged letters; one of them, by a strategem, bearing the
very signature and seal of the Cardinal of Naples, who of
all the Sacred College had most exerted his influence at
Rome in favor of the Frate. The purport of the letters
was to state that the Cardinal was on his j)rogress from
Pisa, and, unwilling for strong reasons to enter Florence,
yet desirous of taking counsel with Savonarola at this dif-
ficult juncture, intended to pause this very day at San
Oasciano, about ten miles from the city, whence he would
ride out the next morning in the plain garb of a priest,
and meet Savonarola, as if casually, five miles on the Flor-
ence road, two hours after sunrise. The plot, of which
these forged letters were the initial step, was that Dolfo
Spini with a band of his Comj^agnacci was to be posted in
ambush on the road, at a lonely spot about five miles from
the gates; that he was to seize Savonaroli with the Domin-
ican brotlier who would accompany him according to rule,
and deliver him over to a small detachment of Milanese
horse in readiness near San Gasciano, by Avhom he was to
be carried into the Roman territory.

There was a strong chance that the penetrating Frate
would susj)ect a trap, and decline to incur the risk, which
he had for some time avoided, of going beyond the city
walls. Even when he preached, his friends held it neces-
sary that he should be attended by an armed guard ; and
here he was called upon to commit himself to a solitary
road, with no other attendant than a fellow-monk. On
this ground the minimum of time had been given him for
decision, and the chance in favor of his acting on the
letters was, that the eagerness with which his mind was
set on the combining of interests within and without the
Church toward the procuring of a General Council, and
also the expectation of immediate service from the Cardi-
nal in the actual juncture of his contest with the Pope,
would triumph over his shrewdness and caution in the
brief space allowed for deliberation.

Tito had had an audience of Savonarola, having declined
to put the letters into any hands but his, and with con-

BY A STHEET LAMP. 379

summate art had admitted tliat incidentally, and by infer-
ence, he was able so far to conjecture their purport as to
believe they referred to a rendezvous outside the gates, in
which case he urged that the Frate should seek an armed
guard from the Signoria, and offered his services in carry-
ing the request with the utmost privacy. Savonarola had
replied briefly that this was impossible: an armed guard
was incompatible with privacy. He spoke with a flashing
eye, and Tito felt convinced that he meant to incur the
risk.

Tito himself did not much care for the result. He
managed his affairs so cleverly, that all results, he con-
sidered, must turn to his advantage. Whichever party
came uppermost, he was secure of favor and money. That
is an indecorously naked statement; the fact, clothed as
Tito habitually clothed it, was that his acute mind, dis-
cerning the equal hollowness of all parties, took the only
rational course in making them subservient to his own
interest.

If Savonarola fell into the snare, there were diamonds
in question and papal patronage; if not, Tito's adroit
agency had strengthened his position with Savonarola and
with Spiiii, Avhile any confidences he obtained from them
made him the more valuable as an agent of the Mediceans.

But Spini was an inconvenient colleague. He had
cunning enough to delight in jolots, but not the ability or
self-command necessary to so complex an effort as secrecy.
He frequently got excited with drinking, for even sober
Florence had its " Beoni,"or topers, both lay and clerical,
who became loud at taverns and private banquets; and in
spite of the agreement between him and Tito, that their
public recognition of each other should invariably be of
the coolest sort, there was always the possibility that on
an evening encounter he would be suddenly blurting and
affectionate. The delicate sign of casting the becchetto
over the left shoulder was understood in the morning, but
the strongest hint short of a threat might not suffice to
keep off a fraternal grasp of the shoulder in the evening.

Tito's _ chief hope now was that Dolfo Spini had not
caught sight of him, and the hope would have been well
founded if Spini had had no clearer view of him than he
had caught of Spini. But, himself in shadow, he had seen
Tito illuminated for an instant by the direct rays of the
lamp, and Tito in his way was as "strongly marked a per-
sonage as the captain of the Compaguacci. Eomola's

380 ROAIOLA.

black-shrouded figure had escaped notice, and she now
stood behind her husband^s shoulder in the corner of the
loggia. Tito was not left to hope long.

" Ha! my carrier-pigeon!" grated Spini's harsh voice, in
what he meant to be an undertone, while his hand grasped
Tito's shoulder, " what did you run into hiding for.^ You
didn't know it was comrades who were coming. It's well
I caught sight of you; it saves time. What of the chase
to-morrow morning? Will the bald-headed game rise?
Are the falcons to be got ready ? "

If it had been in Tito's nature to feel an access of rage,
he would have felt it against this bull-faced accomplice,
unfit either for a leader or a tool. His lips turned white,
but his excitement came from the pressing difficulty of
choosing a safe device. If he attempted to hush Spini,
that would only deepen Romola's suspicion, and he knew
her well enough to know that if some strong alarm
were roused in her, she was neither to be silenced nor
hoodwinked; on the other hand, if he repelled Spini
angrily the wine-breathing Compagnaccio might become
savage, being more ready at resentment than at the divina-
tion of motives. Ho adopted a third course, which proved
that Romola retained one sort of power over him — the
power of dread.

He pressed her hand, as if intending to hint to her, and
said in a good-humored tone oi comradeship —

"Yes, my Dolfo, you may prepare in all security. But
take no trumpets with you."

"Don't be afraid," said Spini, a little piqued. "No
need to play Ser Saccente with me. I know where the
devil keej)s his tail as well as you do. What! he swallowed
the bait whole? The jirophctic nose didn't scent the hook
at all?" he went on, lowering his tone a little, with a
blundering sense of secrecy.

" Tlie brute will not be satisfied till he has emptied the
bag," thought Tito; but aloud he said — " Swallowed all as
easily as you swallow a cup of Trebbiano. Ha! I see
torches ; there must be a dead body coming. The pesti-
lence has been spreading, I hear."

"Santiddio! I hate the sight of those biers. Good
niglit," said Spini, hastily moving off.

The torches were really coming, but they preceded a
church dignitary who was returning liomc\vard; the sug-
gestion of the dead body and the pestilence was Tito's
device for getting rid of Spini without telling him to go.

BT A STREET LAMP. 381

The moment he had moved away, Tito turned to Komola,
and said, quietly —

"Do not be alarmed by anything that bestia has said,
my Romola. We will go on now : I think the rain has not
increased. "

She was quivering with indignant resolution; it was of
no use for Tito to speak in that unconcerned way. She
distrusted every word he could utter.

"I will not go on," she said. "I will not move nearer
home until I have some security against this treachery
being perpetrated."

''Wait, at least, until these torches have passed," said
Tito, with perfect self-command, but with a new rising
of dislike to a wife who this time, he foresaw, might have
the power of thwarting him in sjDite of the husband's pre-
dominance.

The torches passed, with the Vicario dell Arcivescovo,
and due reverence was done by Tito, but Romola saw
nothing outward. If for the defeat of this treachery, in
which she believed with all the force of long presentiment,
it had been necessary at that moment for her to spring on
her husband and hurl herself with him down a precipice,
she felt as if she could have done it. Union with this
man! At that moment the self-quelling discipline of two
years seemed to be nullified: she felt nothing but that they
were divided.

Tliey were nearly in darkness again, and could only see
each other's faces dimly.

"Tell me the truth, Tito — this time tell me the truth,"
said Romola, in a low quivering voice. " It will be safer
for you."

"Why should I desire to tell you anything else, my
angry saint?" said Tito, with a slight touch of contempt,
which was the vent of his annoyance; "since the truth is
precisely that over which you have most reason to rejoice —
namely, that my knowing a plot of Spini's enables me to
secure the Frate from falling a victim to it."

"What is the plot?"
• " That I decline to tell," said Tito. " It is enough that
the Frate's safety will be secured."

"It is a plot for drawing him outside the gates that
Spini may murder him."

" There has been no intention of murder. It is simply
a plot for compelling him to obey the Pope's summons to
Rome. But as I serve the popular government, and think

382 ROMOLA.

the Frate's presence here is a necessary means of main-
taining it at present, I choose to prevent his departure.
You may go to sleep with entire ease of mind to-night."

For a moment Komola was silent. Then she said, in a
voice of anguish, *' Tito, it is of no use: I have no belief
in you."

She could just discern his action as he shrugged his
shoulders, and spread out his palms in silence. That cold
dislike which is the anger of unimpassioned beings was
hardening within him.

"If the Frate leaves the city — if any harm happens to
him," said Romoia, after a slight pause, in a new tone of
indignant resolution, — " I will declare what I have heard
to the Signoria, and you Avill be disgraced. "What if I am
your wife?" she went on, imiaetuously; ''I will be dis-
graced with you. If we are united, I am that part of you
that will save you from crime. Others shall not be
betrayed."

''I am quite aware of what you would be likely to do,
anima mia," said Tito, in the coolest of his liquid tones;
" therefore if you have a small amount of reasoning at your
disposal just now, consider that if you believe me in
nothing else, you may believe me when I say I will take
care of myself, and not put it in your power to ruin me. "

" Then you assure me that the Frate is warned — he will
not go beyond the gates?"

" He shall not go beyond the gates."

There was a moment's pause, but distrust was not to be
expelled.

" I will go back to San Marco now and find out," Romoia
said, making a movement forward.

"You shall not!" said Tito, in a bitter whisper, seizing
her wrists with all his masculine force. "I am master of
you. You shall not set yourself in opposition to me."

There Avere passers-by approaching. Tito had heard
them, and that was why he spoke in a whisper. Romoia
was too conscious of being mastered to have struggled, even
if she had remained unconscious that witnesses were at
hand. But she was aware now of footsteps and voices, and
her habitual sense of personal dignity made her at once
yield to Tito's movement toward leading her from the
loggia.

They walked on in silence for some time, under the
small drizzling rain. The first rush of indignation and
alarm in Romoia had begun to give way to more compli-

BY A STREET LAMP. 383

cated feelings, which rendered speech and action difficult.
In that simpler state of vehemence, open opposition to the
husband from whom she felt her soul revolting had had
the aspect of temptation for her; it seemed the easiest of
all courses. But now, habits of self-questioning, memories
of impulse subdued, and that proud reserve which all dis-
cipline had left unmodified, began to emerge from the
flood of passion. The grasp of her wrists, which asserted
her husband^s physical predominance, instead of arousing
a new fierceness m her, as it might have done if her
impetuosity had been of a more vulgar kind, had given her
a momentary shuddering horror at this form of contest
with him. It was the first time they had been in declared
hostility to each other since her flight and return, and the
check given to her ardent resolution then, retained the
power to arrest her now. In this altered condition her
mind began to dwell on the probabilities that would save
her from any desperate course: Tito would not risk
betrayal by her; whatever had been his original intention,
he must be determined now by the fact that she knew of
the plot. She was not bound now to do anything else
than to hang over him that certainty, that if he deceived
her, her lips would not be closed. And then, it Avas pos-
sible— yes, she must cling to that possibility till it was
disproved — that Tito had never m^ant to aid in the
betrayal of the Frate.

Tito, on his side, was busy with thoughts, and did not
speak again till they were near home. Then he said —

"Well, Romola, have you now had time to recover
calmness? If so, you can supply your want of belief in
me by a little rational inference: you can see, I presume,
that if I had had any intention of furthering Spini's plot, I
should now be aware that the possession of a fair Piagnone
for my wife, who knows the secret of the plot, would be a
serious obstacle in mj' way."

Tito assumed the tone which was just then the easiest
to him, conjecturing that in Romola's present mood per-
suasive deprecation would be lost upon her.

"Yes, Tito," she said, in a low voice, " I think you
believe that I would guard the Republic from further
treachery. You are right to believe it: if the Frate is
betrayed, I will denounce you." She paused a moment,
and then said with an effort, " But it was not so. I have
perhaps spoken too hastily — you never meant it. Only,
why will you seem to be that man's comrade?"

384 EOMOLA.

"Such relations are inevitable to practical men, my
Romola," said Tito, gratified by discerning the struggle
within her. "You fair creatures live in the clouds. Pray
go to rest with an easy heart, ^' he added, opening the door
for her.

CHAPTER XLVII.

CHECK.

Tito's clever arrangements had been unpleasantly frus-
trated by trivial incidents which could not enter into a
clever man^s calculations. It was very seldom that he
walked with Romola in the evening, yet he had hapj)ened
to be Avalking with her precisely on this evening when her
presence was supremely inconvenient. Life was so com-
plicated a game that the devices of skill were liable to be
defeated at every turn by air-blown chances, incalculable
as the descent of thistle-down.

It was not that he minded about the failure of Spini's
plot, bnt he felt an awkward difficulty in so adjusting his
warning to Savonarola on the one hand, and to Spini on
the other, as not to incur suspicion. Suspicion roused in
the popular party might be fatal to his reputation and
ostensible position in Florence; suspicion roused in Dolfo
Spini might be as disagreeable in its effects as the hatred
of a fierce dog not to be chained.

If Tito went forthwith to the monastery to warn Sav-
onarola before the monks went to rest, his warning would
follow so closely on his delivery of the forged letters that
he could not escape unfavorable surmises. He could not
warn Spini at once without telling him the true reason,
since he could not immediately allege the discovery that
Savonarola had changed his purpose; and he knew Spini
well enough to know that his understanding would discern
nothing but that Tito had "turned round" and frustrated
the plot. On the other hand, by deferring his warning to
Savonarola until the morning, he would be almost sure to
lose the opportunity of warning Spini that the Frate had
changed his mind; and the band of Compagnacci would
come back in all the rage of disappointment. This last,
however, was the risk he chose, trusting to his power of
soothing Spini by assuring him that the failure was due
only to the Prate's caution.

CHECK. 385

Tito was annoyed. If he had had to smile it would
have been an unusual effort to him. He was determined
not to encounter Eomola again, and he did not go home
that night.

She watched through the night, and never took off her
clothes. She heard the rain become heavier and heavier.
She liked to hear the rain: the stormy heavens seemed a safe-
guard against men's devices, compelling them to inaction.
And Romola's mind was again assailed, not only by the
utmost doubt of her husband, but by doubt as to her
own conduct. What lie might he not have told her?
What project might he not have, of whicli she was still
ignorant? Every one who trusted Tito was in danger; it
was useless to try and persuade herself of the contrary.
And was not she selfishly listening to the promptings of
her own pride, when she shrank from warning men against
him? "If her husband was a malefactor, her place was
in the prison by his side" — that might be; she was con-
tented to fulfill that claim. But was she, a wife, to allow
a husband to inflict the injuries that would make him a
malefactor, when it might be in her power to prevent
them? Prayer seemed impossible to her. The activity of
her thought excluded a mental state of which the essence
is expectant passivity.

The excitement became stronger and stronger. Her
imagination, in a state of morbid activity, conjured up
possible schemes by which, after all, Tito would have
eluded her threat; and toward daybreak the rain became
less violent, till at last it ceased, the breeze rose again and
dispersed the clouds, and the morning fell clear on all the
objects around her. It made her uneasiness all the less
endurable. She wrapped her mantle round her, and ran
up to the loggia; as if there could be anytJiing in the wide
landscape that might determine her action; as if there
could be anything but roofs hiding the line of street along
which Savonarola might be walking toward betrayal.

If she went to her godfather, might she not induce him,
without any specific revelation, to take measures for pre-
venting Fra Girolamo from passing the gates? But that
might be too late. Romola thought, with new distress,
that she had failed to learn any guiding details from Tito,
and it was already long past seven. She must go to San
Marco: there was nothing else to be done.

She hurried down the stairs, she went out into the
street without looking at licr sick people, and walked
35

386 KOMOLA.

at a swift pace along the Via de Bardi toward the Ponte
Vecchio. She would go through the heart of the city;
it was the most direct road, and, besides, in the great
Piazza there was a chance of encounteri]ig her husband,
who, by some possibility to which she still clung, might
satisfy her of the Prate's safety, and leave no need for her
to go 'to San Marco. When she arrived in front of the
Palazza Vecchio, she looked eagerly into the pillared
court; then her eyes swept the Piazza; but the well-known
figure, once painted in her heart by young love, and now
branded there by eating jmin, was nowhere to be seen.
She hurried straight on to the Piazza del Duomo. It was
already full of movement: there were worshipers passing
up and down the marble steps, there were men pausing
for chat, and there were market-people carrying their bur-
dens. Between those moving figures Eomola caught a
glimpse of her, husband. On his way from San Marco he
had turned into Nello's shop, and was now leaning against
the door-post. As Romola approached she could see that
he was standing and talking, with the easiest air in the
world, holding his cap in his hand, and shaking back his
freshly-combed hair. The contrast of this ease with the
bitter anxieties he had created convulsed her with indig-
nation: the new vision of his hardness heightened her
dread. She recognized Cronaca and two other frequenters
of San Marco standing near her husband. It flashed through
her mind — "I Avill compel him to speak before those
men." And her light step brought her close upon him
before he had time to move, while Cronaca was saying,
"Here comes Madonna Eomola."

A slight shock passed through Tito's frame as he felt
himself face to face with his wife. She was haggard with
her anxious watching, but there was a flash of something
else than anxiety in her eyes as she said —

" Is the Frate gone beyond the gates? "

"No," said Tito, feeling completely helpless before this
woman, and needing all the self-command he possessed to
preserve a countenance in which there should seem to be
nothing stronger than surprise.

"And you are certain that he is not going?" she
insisted.

"I am certain that he is not going."

"That is enough," said Romola, and she turned up the
steps, to take refuge in the Duomo, till she could recover
from her agitation.

COUNTER-CHECK. 387

Tito never had a feeling so near hatred as that with
which his eyes followed Romola retreating up the steps.

There were present not only genuine followers of the
Frate, but Ser Ceccone, the notary, who at tliat time, like
Tito himself, was secretly an agent of the Mediceans.

Ser Francesco di Ser Barone, more briefly known to
infamy as Ser Ceccone, was not learned, not handsome,
not successful, and the reverse of generous. He was a
traitor without a charm. It followed that he was not fond
of Tito Melema.

CHAPTEE XLVIII.

COUNTER-CHECK.

It was late in the afternoon when Tito returned home.
Romola, seated opposite the cabinet in her narrow room,
copying documents, was about to desist from her work
because the light was getting dim, when her husband
entered. He had come straight to this room to seek her,
with a thoroughly defined intention, and there was some-
thing new to Romola in liis manner and expression as he
looked at her silently on entering, and, without taking off
his cap and mantle, leaned one elbow on the cabinet, and
stood directly in front of her.

Romola, fully assured during the day of the Frate's
safety, was feeling the reaction of some penitence for the
access of distrust and iiidignation which had impelled her
to address her husband publicly on a matter that she knew
he wished to be private. She told herself that she had
probably been wrong. The scheming duplicity which she
had heard even her godfather allude to as inseparable
from party tactics might be sufficient to account for the
connection with Spmi, without the supposition that Tito
had ever meant to further the plot. She M-anted to atone
for her impetuosity by confessing that she had been too
hasty, and for some hours her mind had been dwelling on
the possibility that this confession of hers might lead to
other frank words breaking the two years' silence of their
hearts. The silence had been so complete, that Tito was
ignorant of her having fled from him and come back
again; they had never approached an avowal of that past

388 KOMOLA.

which, both in its young love and in the shock that shat-
tered the love, lay locked away from them like a banquet-
room where death had once broken the feast.

She looked up at him with that submission in her
glance which belonged to her state of self-reproof; but
the subtle change in his face and manner arrested her
speech. For a few moments they remained silent, looking
at each other.

Tito himself felt that a crisis was come in his married
life. The husband's determination to mastery, which lay
deep below all blandness and beseechingness, had risen
permanently to the surface now, and seemed to alter his
face, as a face is altered by a hidden muscular tension
with which a man is secretly throttling or stamping out
the life from something feeble, yet dangerous.

" Romola," he began, in the cool liquid tone that made
her shiver, "it is time that we should understand each
other." He paused.

" That is what I most desire, Tito," she said, faintly.
Her sweet pale face, with all its anger gone and nothing
but the timidity of self-doubt in it, seemed to give a
marked predominance to her husband's dark strength.

''You took a step this morning," Tito went on, "which
you must now yourself perceive to have been useless —
which exposed you to remark and may involve me in
serious practical difficulties."

" I acknowledge that I was too hasty; I am sorry for
any injustice I may have done you." Romola spoke these
words in a fuller and firmer tone; Tito, she hoped, would
look less hard when she had expressed her regret, and
then she could say other things.

"I wish you once for all to understand," he said, with-
out any change of voice, "that such collisions are incom-
patible with our position as husband and wife. I wish you
to reflect on the mode in which you were led to that step,
that the process may not be repeated."

"That depends chiefly on you, Tito," said Romola,
taking fire slightly. It was not at all what she had
thought of sayingj'^but we see a very little way before us
in mutual speech.

"You would say, I suppose," answered Tito, "that
nothing is to occur in future which can excite your unrea-
sonable suspicions. You were frank enough to say last
night that you have no belief in me. I am not surprised
at any exaggerated conclusion you may draAv from slight

COUNTER-CHECK. 389

premises, but I wish to point out to you what is likely to
be the fruit of your making such exaggerated conclusions
a ground for interfering in affairs of which you are
ignorant. Your attention is thoroughly awake to what I
am saying?"

He paused for a reply.

"Yes," said Romola, flushing in irrepressible resent-
ment at this cold tone of superiority.

"Well, then, it may possibly not be very long before
some other chance words or incidents set your imagination
at work devising crimes for me, and you may perhaps rush
to the Palazzo Vecchio to alarm the Signoria and set the
city in an uproar. Shall I tell you what may be the
result? Not simply the disgrace of your husband, to
which you look forward with so much courage, but the
arrest and ruin of many among the chief men in Florence,
including Messer Bernardo del ISTero."

Tito had meditated a decisive move, and he had made it.
The flush died out of Romola's face, and her very lips
were pale — an unusual effect with her, for she was little
subject to fear. Tito perceived his success.

"You would perhaps flatter yourself," he went on,
"that you were performing a heroic deed of deliverance;
you might as well try to turn locks with fine words as
apply such notions to the politics of Florence. The ques-
tion now is, not whether you can have any belief in me,
but whether, now you have been warned, you will dare to
rush, like a blind man with a torch in his hand, amongst
intricate affairs of which you know nothing."

Eomola felt as if her mind were held in a vice by Tito's:
the possibilities he had indicated were rising before her
with terrible clearness.

"I am too rash," she said. " I will try not to be rash."

" Eemember," said Tito, with unsparing insistence,
" that your act of distrust toward me this morning might,
for aught you knew, have had more fatal effects than that
sacrifice of your husband which you have learned to con-
template without flinching."

" Tito, it is not so," Romola burst forth in a pleading
tone, rising and going nearer to him, with a desperate
resolution to speak out. " It is false that I would will-
ingly sacrifice you. It has been the greatest effort of my
life to cling to you. I went away in my anger tAvo years
ago, and I came back again because I was more bound to
you than to anything else on earth. But it is useless.

390 ROMOLA.

You shut me out from your mind. You affect to think
of me as a being too unreasonable to share in the knowl-
edge of your affairs. You will be open with me about
nothing."

She looked like his good angel pleading with him, as
she bent her face toward him with dilated eyes, and laid
her hand upon his ai-m. But Eomola's touch and glance
no longer stirred any fibre of tenderness in her husband.
The good-humored, tolerant Tito, incapable of hatred,
incapable almost of impatience, disposed always to be
gentle toward the rest of the world, felt himself becoming
strangely hard toward this wife, whose presence had once
been the strongest influence lie had known. With all his
softness of disposition, he had a masculine effectiveness of
intellect and purpose which, like sharpness of edge, is
itself an energy, working its way Avitiiout any strong
momentum. Romola had an energy of her own which
thwarted his, and no man, who is not exceptionally feeble,
will endure being thwarted by his wife. Marriage must
be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.

No emotion darted across his face as he heard Romola
for the first time speak of having gone away from him.
His lips only looked a little harder as he smiled slightly
and said —

" My Romola, when certain conditions are ascertained,
we must make up our minds to them. No amount of
wishing will fill the Arno, as your people say, or turn a
plum Into an orange. I have not observed even that
prayers have much efficacy that way. You are so con-
stituted as to have certain strong impressions inaccessible
to reason: I cannot share those impressions, and you have
withdrawn all trust from me in consecpience. You have
changed toward me; it has followed that I have changed
toward you. It is useless to take any retrospect. We
have simply to adapt ourselves to altered conditions."

" Tito, it would not be useless for us to speak openly,"
said Romola, with a sort of exasperation that comes from
using living muscle against some lifeless insurmountable
resistance. " It was the sense of deception in you that
changed me, and that has kept us apart. And it is not
true that I changed first. You changed toward me the
night you first W(jre that chain-armor. You had some
secret from me — it was about that old man — and I saw
him again yesterday. Tito/' she went on, in a tone of
agonized entreaty, "if you would once tell me everything,

COUNTER-CHECK. 391

let it be what it may— I would not mind pain— that there
might be no wall between us! Is it not possible that we
could begin a new life? "

This time there was a flash of emotion across Tito's
face. He stood perfectly still; but the flash seemed to
have whitened him. He took no notice of Romola's
appeal, but after a moment's pause, said quietlv —

"Your impetuosity about trifles, Romola, has a freezing
influence that would cool the baths of Xero. " At these
cutting words, Romola shrank and drew herself up into
her usual self-sustained attitude. Tito went on. "If by
'that old man' you mean the mad Jacopo di Nola who
attempted my life and made a strange accusation against
me, of which I told you nothing because it would have
alarmed 3'ou to no purpose, he, poor wretch, has died in
prison. I saw his name in the list of dead."

"I know nothing about his accusation," said Romola.
"But I know he is the man whom I saw with the rope
round his neck in the Duomo — the man whose portrait
Piero di Cosimo painted, grasping your arm as he saw
him grasp it the day the French entered, the dav vou first
wore the armor."

"And where is he now, pray?" said Tito, still pale, but
governing himself.

"He was lying lifeless in the street from starvation,"
said Romola. "I revived him with bread and wine. I
brought him to our door, but he refused to come in.
Then I gave him some money, and he went away without
telling me anything. But he had found out that I was
your wife, ^\l^o is he?"

"A man, half mad, half imbecile, who was once my
father's servant in Greece, and who has a rancorous hatred
toward me because I got him dismissed for theft. Xow
you have the whole mystery, and the further satisfaction
of knowing that I am again in danger of assassination.
The fact of my wearing the armor, about which vou seem
to have thought so much, must have led you to infer that
I was in danger from this man. Was that the reason you
chose to cultivate his acquaintance and invite him into
the house?"

Romola was mute. To speak was only like rushing with
bare breast against a shield.

Tito moved from his leaning posture, slowly took off
his cap and mantle, and pushed back his hair. He was
collecting himself for some final words. And Romola

:^\)'i KO.MOLA.

stood upright looking at him as she might have looked at
some on-coming deadly force, to be met only by silent
endurance.

"We need not refer to these matters again, Eomola,"
he said, precisely in the same tone as that in which he had
spoken at first. "It is enough if you will remember that
the next time your generous ardor leads you to interfere
in political affairs, you are likely, not to save any one from
danger, but to be raising scaffolds and setting houses on
fire. You are not yet a sufficiently ardent Piagnone to
believe that Messer Bernardo del ISTero is the prince of
darkness, and Messer Francesco Valori the archangel
Michael. I think I need demand no promise from you?"

"I have understood you too well, Tito."

"It is enough," he said, leaving the room.

Eomola turned round with despair in her face and sank
into her seat. "0 God, I have tried — I cannot help it.
We shall always be divided." Those words passed silently
through her mind. "Unless," she said aloud, as if some
sudden vision had startled her into speech — "unless
misery should come and join us!"

Tito, too, had a new thought in his mind after he had
closed the door behind him. ' AVith the project of leaving
Florence as soon as his life there had become a high
enough stepping-stone to a life elsewhere, perhaps at Eome
or Milan, there was now for the first time associated a
desire to be free from Eomola, and to leave her behind
him. She had ceased to belong to the desirable furniture
of his life: there was no possibility of an easy relation
between them without genuineness on his part. Genuine-
ness implied confession of the past, and confession involved
a change of purpose. But Tito had as little bent that way
as a leopard has to lap milk when its teetli are grown.
From all relations that were not easy and agreeable, we
know that Tito shrank: why should he cling to them?

And Eomola had made his relations difficult with others
besides herself. He had had a troublesome interview with
Dolfo Spini, who had come back in a rage after an ineffect-
ual soaking with rain and long waiting in ambush, and
that scene between Eomola and himself at Nello's door,
once reported in Spini's car, might be a seed of something
more unmanageable than suspicion. But now, at least, he
believed that he had mastered Eomola by a terror which
appealed to the strongest forces of her nature. He had
alarmed her affection and her conscience by the shadowy

THE PYRAMID OF VANITIES. 393

image of consequences; he had arrested her intellect by
hanging before it the idea of a hopeless complexity in
aifairs which defied any moral judgment.

Yet Tito was not at ease. The world was not yet quite
cushioned with velvet, and, if it had been, he could not
have abandoned himself to that softness with thorough
enjoyment; for before he went out again this evening he
put on his coat of chain-armor.

CHAPTER XLIX.

THE PTEAMID OF VANITIES.

The wintry days passed for Romola as the white ships
pass one who is standing lonely on the shore — passing in
sileuee and sameness, yet each bearing a hidden burden of
coming change. Tito's hint had mingled so much dread
with her interest in the progress of public affairs that she
had begun to court ignorance rather than knowledge. The
threatening German Emjieror was gone again; and, in
other ways besides, the position of Florence was alleviated;
but so much distress remained that Romola's active duties
were hardly diminished, and in these, as usual, her mind
found a refuge from its doubt.

She dared not rejoice that the relief which had come in
extremity and had appeared to justify the j)olicy of the
Frate's party, was making that party so triumphant that
Francesco Yalori, hot-tempered chieftain of the Piagnoni,
had been elected Gonfaloniere at the beginning of the year,
and was making haste to have as much of his own liberal
way as possible during his two months of power. That
seemed for the moment like a strengthening of the party
most attached to freedom, and a reinforcement of protec-
tion to Savonarola; but Romola was now alive to every
suggestion likely to deepen her foreboding, that Avhatever
the present might be, it was only an unconscious brooding
over the mixed germs of Change, which might any day
become tragic. And already by Carnival time, a little after
mid-February, her presentiment Avas confirmed by the
signs of a very decided change: the Mediceans had ceased to
be passive, and were openly exerting themselves to procure
the election of Bernardo del JS^ero as the new Gonfaloniere.

394 EOMOLA.

On the last day of the Carnival, between ten and eleven
in the morning, Romola walked out, according to promise,
toward the Corso degli Albizzi, to fetch her cousin Brig-
ida, that they might both be ready to start from the Via
de Bardi early in the afternoon, and take their places at a
window which Tito had had reserved for them in the
Piazza della Signoria, where there was to be a scene of so
new and striking a sort, that all Florentine eyes must
desire to see it. For the Piagnoni were having their own
way thoroughly about the mode of keeping the Carnival.
In vain Dolfo Spini and his companions had struggled to
get up the dear old masks and practical jokes, well spiced
with indecency. Such things were not to be in a city where
Christ had been declared king.

Romola set out in that languid state of mind with which
every one enters on a long day of sight-seeing, purely for
the sake of gratifying a child, or some dear childish
friend. The day was certainly an epoch in carnival kee^i-
ing; but this phase of reform had not touched her enthusi-
asm: and she did not know that it was an epoch in her
own life when another lot Avould begin to be no longer
secretly but visibly entwined Avitli her own.

She chose to go through the great Piazza that she might
take a first survey of the unparalleled sight there while
she was still alone. Entering it from the south, she saw
something monstrous and many-colored in the shape of a
jjyramid, or, rather, like a huge fir tree, sixty feet high,
with shelves on the branches, widening and widening
toward the base till they reached a circumference of eighty
yards. The Piazza was full of life: slight young figures,
in white garments, with olive wreaths on their heads, were
moving to and fro about the base of the pyramidal tree,
carrying baskets full of bright colored things; and maturer
forms, some in the monastic frock, some in the loose tunics
and dark red caps of artists, were helping and examining
or else retreating to various points in the distance to sur-
vey the wondrous whole: while a considerable group,
amongst whom Romola recognized Piero di Cosimo, stand-
ing on the marble steps of Orgagna's Loggia, seemed to be
keeping aloof in discontent and scorn.

Approaching nearer, she paused to look at the multi-
farious objects ranged in gradation from the base to the
summit of the pyramid. There were tapestries and bro-
cades of immodest design, pictures and sculptures held
too likely to incite to vice; there were boards and tables

THE PYliAMID OP VANITIES. 395

for all sorts of games, playing cards, along with the blocks
tor i^rmting them, dice, and other apparatus for gambling:
there were worldly music books, and musical instrument^
m all the pretty varieties of lute, drum, cymbal and trum-
pet; there were masks and masquerading dresses used in the
old Carnival shows; there were handsome copies of Ovid
Boccaccio, Petrarca, Pulci, and other books of a vain or
impure sort; there were all the implements of feminine
vanity— rouge-pots, false hair, mirrors, perfumes, powders
and transparent veils intended to provoke inquisitive
glances: lastly, at the very summit, there was the unflat-
tering effigy of a probably mythical Venetian merchant,
who was understood to have offered a heavy sum for this
collection of marketable abominations, and, soaring above
him m surpassing ugliness, the symbolic figure of the old
debauched Carnival.

This was the preparation for a new sort of bonfire— the
Burning of Vanities. Hidden in the interior of the pyra-
mid was a plentiful store of dry fuel and gunpowder; and
on this last day of the festival, at evening, the pile of
vanities was to be set ablaze to the sound of trumpets, and
the ugly old Carnival was to tumble into the flames amid
the songs of reforming triumph.

This crowning act of the new festivities could hardly
have been prepared but for a peculiar organization which
had been started by Savonarola two years before. The mass
of the Florentine boyhood and youtli was no longer left
to its own genial promptings toward street mischief
and crude dissoluteness. Under the training of Fra
Domenico, a sort of lieutenant to Savonarola, lads and
striplings, the hope of Florence, were to have none but
pure words on their lips, were to have a zeal for Unseen
(rood that should put to shame the lukewarmness of their
elders, and were to know no pleasures save of an angelic
sort— singing divine praises and walking in white robes.
It was for them that the ranges of seats had been raised
high against the walls of the Duomo; and they had been
used to hear Savonarola appeal to them as the future o-lory
of a city specially appointed to do the work of God. '^

These fresh-cheeked troops were the chief agents in the
regenerated merriment of the new Carnival, which was
a sort of sacred parody of the old. Had there been bon-
fires m the old time? There was to be a bonfire now
consuming impurity from off the earth. Had there been
symbolic processions? There were to be processions now,

396 ROMOLA.

but the symbols were to be white robes and red crosses and
_ olive wreaths — emblems of peace and innocent gladness —
and the banners and images held aloft were to tell the
triumphs of goodness. Had there been dancing in a ring
under the open sk_y of the Piazza, to the sound of choral
voices chanting loose songs? There was to be dancing in a
ring now, but dancing of monks and laity in fraternal love
and divine joy, and the music was to be the music of
hymns. As for the collections from street passengers, they
were to be greater than ever — not for gross and superfluous
suppers, but — for the benefit of the hungry and needy;
and, besides, there was the collecting of the Anutliema, or
the Vanities to be laid on the great pyramidal bonfire.

Troops of young inquisitors went from house to house
on this exciting business of asking that the Anathema
should be given up to them. Perhaps, after the more
avowed vanities had been surrendered. Madonna, at the
head of the household, had still certain little reddened
balls brought from the Levant, intended to produce on a
sallow cheek a sudden bloom of the most ingenuous falsity?
If so, let her bring them down and cast them into the
basket of doom. Or, perhaps, she had ringlets and coils of
" dead hair"? — if so, let her bring them to the street-door,
not on her head, but in her hands, and publicly renounce
the Anathema which hid the respectable signs of age under
a ghastly mockery of youth. And, in reward, she would
hear fresh young voices pronounce a blessing on her and
her house.

The beardless inquisitors, organized into little regi-
ments, doubtless took to their work very willingly. To
coerce people by shame, or other spiritual pelting, into
the giving up of things it will probably vex them to part
with, is a form of piety to which the boyish mind is most
readily converted; and if some obstinately wicked men
got enraged and threatened the whip or the cudgel,
this also was exciting. Savonarola himself evidently
felt about the training of these boys the difficulty weigh-
ing on all minds with noble yearnings toward great
ends, yet with that imperfect perception of means which
forces a resort to some supernatural constraining influence
as the only sure hope. The Florentine youth had had
very evil habits and foul tongues: it seemed at first an
unmixed blessing when they were got to shout " Viva
Gesh! But Savonarola was forced at last to say from the
pulpit, ''There is a little too much shouting of 'Viva

THE PYRAMID OF VANITIES. 397

Gesii !' This constant utterance of sacred Avords brings
them into contempt. Let me have no more of that shout-
ing till the next Festa."

Nevertheless, as the long stream of white-robed youth-
fulness, with its little red crosses and olive wreaths, had
gone to the Duomo at dawn this morning to receive the
communion from the hands of Savonarola, it was a sight of
beauty; and, doubtless, many of those young souls were
laying up memories of hope and awe that might save
them from ever resting in a merely vulgar view of their
work as men and citizens. There is no kind of conscious
obedience that is not an advance on lawlessness, and these
boys became the generation of men who fought greatly
and endured greatly in the last struggle of their Republic.
Now, in the intermediate hours between the early com-
munion and dinner-time, they were making their last
perambulations to collect alms and vanities, and this
was why Eoraola saw the slim white figures moving to and
fro about the base of the great pyramid.

"What think you of this folly. Madonna Eomola?"
said a brusque voice close to her ear. "Your Piagnoni
will make I'inferno a pleasant prospect to us, if they are
to carry things their own way on earth. It's enough to
fetch a cudgel over the mountains to see painters, like
Lorenzo di Credi and young Baccio there, helping to burn
color out of life in this fashion."

"My good Piero," said Romola, looking \\\) and smiling
at the grim man, "even you must be glad to see some of
these things burned. Look at those gewgaws and wigs and
rouge-pots; I have heard you talk as indignantly against
those things as Fra Girolamo himself."

""What then?" said Piero, turning round on her sharply.
"I never said a woman should make a black patch of
herself against the background. Va! Madonna Antigone,
it's a shame for a woman with your hair and shoulders to
run into such nonsense — leave it to women who are not
worth painting. What! the most holy Virgin lierself has
always been dressed well; that's the doctrine of the church:
— talk of heresy, indeed! And I should like to know
Avhat the excellent Messer Bardo would have said to the
burning of the divine poets by these Frati, who are no
better an imitation of men than if they were onions with
the bulbs uppermost. Look at that Petrarca sticking up
beside a rouge-pot: do the idiots pretend that the heavenly
Laura was a painted harridan? And Boccaccio, now: do

398 ROMOLA.

you mean to say, Madonna Romola — you who are fit to be
a model for wise Saint Catherine of Egyj^t — do you mean
to say you have never read the stories of the immortal
Messer Giovanni?"

"It is true I have read them, Piero/' said Romola.
" Some of them a great many times over, when I was a
little girl. I used to get the book down when my father
was asleep, so that I could read to myself."

" Ehhene?" said Piero, in a fiercely challenging tone.

" There are some things in them I do not want ever to
forget," said Romola; ''but you must confess, Piero, that
a great many of these stories are only about low deceit for
the lowest ends. Men do not want books to make them
think lightly of vice, as if life were a vulgar joke. And I
cannot blame Fra Girolamo for teaching that we owe our
time to something better."

'"' Yes, yes, it's very well to say so now you've read them,"
said Piero, bitterly, turning on his heel and walking away
from her.

Romola, too, walked on, smiling at Piero's innuendo,
with a sort of tenderness toward the old painter's anger,
because she knew that her father would have felt some-
thing like it. For herself, she was conscious of no inward
collision with the strict and sombre view of pleasure which
tended to repress poetry in the attempt to repress vice.
Sorrow and joy have each their peculiar narrowness; and
a religious enthusiasm like Savonarola's which ultimately
blesses mankind by giving the soul a strong propulsion
toward sympathy with pain, indignation against wrong,
and the subjugation of sensual desire, must always incur
the reproach of a great negation, Romola's life had given
her an affinity for sadness which inevitably made her unjust
toward merriment. That subtle result of culture which
we call taste was subdued by the need for deeper motive;
just as the nicer demands of the palate are annihilated by
urgent hunger. Moving habitually amongst scenes of suf-
fering, and carrying woman's heaviest disappointment in
her heart, the severity which allied itself Avith self-renounc-
ing beneficent strength had no dissonance for her.

TESSA ABKOAD AND AT HOME. 30'J

CHAPTEE L.

TESSA ABROAD A^iTD AT HOME.

Another figure easily recognized by us — a figure not
clad in black, but in the old red, green, and white — was
api^roaching the Piazza that morning to see the Carnival.
She came from an opposite point, for Tessa no longer
lived on the hill of San Giorgio. After what had hap-
pened there with Baldassarre, Tito had thought it best
for that and other reasons to find her a new home, but still
in a quiet airy quarter, in a house bordering on the wide
garden grounds north of the Porta Santa Croce.

Tessa was not come out sight-seeing without special
leave. Tito had been with her the evening before, and
she had kept back the entreaty which she felt to be swell-
ing her heart and throat until she saw him in a state of
radiant ease, with one arm around the sturdy Lillo, and
the other resting gently on her own shoulder as she tried
to make the tiny Xinna steady on her legs. She was sure
then that the weariness with which he had come in and
flung himself into his chair had quite melted away from
his brow and lips. Tessa had not been slow at learning a
few small stratagems by which she might avoid vexing
Xaldo and yet have a little of her own way. She could read
nothing else, but she had learned to read a good deal in
her husband's face.

And certainly the charm of that bright, gentle-hu-
mored Tito who woke up under the Loggia de Cerchi on a
Lenten morning five years before, not having yet given
any hostages to deceit, never returned so nearly as in the
person of Xaldo, seated in that straight-backed, carved
arm-chair which he had provided for his comfort when he
came to see Tessa and the children. Tito himself was
surprised at the growing sense of relief which he felt in
these moments. No guile was needed toward Tessa: she
was too ignorant and too innocent to suspect him of any-
thing. And the little voices calling him "Babbo'" were
very sweet in his ears for the short while that he heard
them. When he thought of leaving Florence, he never
thought of leaving Tessa and the little ones behind. He
was very fond of these round-cheeked, wide-eyed human
things that clung about him and knew no evil of him.
And wherever affection can spring, it is like the green

400 ROMOLA.

leaf and the blossom — pure, and breathing purity, what-
ever soil it may grow in. Poor Eomola, with all her
self-sacrificing effort, was really helping to harden Tito's
nature by chilling it with a positive dislike which had
beforehand seemed impossible in him: but Tessa kept
open the fountains of kindness.

*'Ninna is very good without me now," began Tessa,
feeling her request rising very high in her throat, and
letting Ninna seat herself on the floor. *' I can leave her
with Monna Lisa any time, and if she is in the cradle and
cries, Lillo is as sensible as can be — ^he goes and thumi)s
Monna Lisa."

Lillo, whose great dark eyes looked all the darker because
his curls were of a light brown like his mother's, jumped
off Babbo's knee, and went forthwith to attest his intelli-
gence by thumping Monna Lisa, who was shaking her
head slowly over her spinning at the other end of the
room.

''A wonderful boy!" said Tito, laughing.

"Isn't he?" said Tessa, eagerly, getting a little closer to
him; "and I might go and^^see the Carnival to-morrow,
just for an hour or two, mightn't I?"

"Oh, you wicked pigeon!" said Tito, pinching her
cheek; "those are your longings, are they? What have
you to do with carnivals now you are an old woman with
two children?"

"But old women like to see things," said Tessa, her
lower lip hanging a little. "Monna Lisa said she should
like to go, only she's so deaf she can't hear what is behind
her, and she thinks we couldn't take care of both the
children."

"No, indeed, Tessa," said Tito, looking rather grave,
"you must not think of taking the children into the
crowded streets, else I shall be angry."

" But I have never been into the Piazza without leave,"
said Tessa, in a frightened, pleading tone, "since the Holy
Saturday, and I think Nofri is dead, for you know the
poor madre died; and I shall never forget the Carnival I
saw once; it was so pretty — all roses and a king and queen
under them — and singing. I liked it better than the San
Giovanni."

" But there's nothing like that now, my Tessa. They
are going to make a bonfire in the Piazza — that's all. But
I cannot let you go out by yourself in the evening."

" Oh, no, no! I don't want to go in the evening. I only

TESSA ABROAD AND AT HOME. 401

want to go and see the procession by daylight. There will
be a procession — is it not true?"

''Yes, after a sort/' said Tito, "as lively as a flight of
cranes. You must not expect roses and glittering kings
and queens, my Tessa. However I suppose any string of
people to be called a procession will please your blue eyes.
And there^s a thing they have raised in the Piazza de Sig-
nori for the bonfire. You may like to see that. But come
home early, and look like a grave little old woman; and if
you see any men with feathers and swords, keep out of
their way: they are very fierce, and like to cut old women's
heads off."

"Santa Madonna! w^here do they come from? Ah! you
are laugliing; it is not so bad. But I will keep away from
them. Only," Tessa went on in a whisper, putting her
lips near Naldo's ear, "if I might take Lillo with me!
He is very sensible."

"But who will thump Monna Lisa then, if she doesn't
hear?" said Tito, finding it difficult not to laugh, but
thinking it necessary to look serious. "No, Tessa, you
could not take care of Lillo if you got into a crowd, and
he's too heavy for you to carry him."

"It is true," said Tessa, rather sadly, "and he likes to
run away. I forgot that. Then I will go alone. But now
look at ISTinna — you have not looked at her enough."

Ninna was a blue-eyed thing, at the tottering, tumbling
age — a fair solid, which, like a loaded die, found its base
with a constancy that warranted prediction. Tessa went
to snatch her up, and when Babbo was paying due atten-
tion to the recent teeth and other marvels, she said, in a
whisper, "And shall I buy some confetti for the children?"

Tito drew some small coins from his scarsella, and
poured them into her palm.

"That will buy no end," said Tessa, delighted at this
abundance. "I shall not mind going without Lillo so
much, if I bring him something."

So Tessa set out in the morning toward the great Piazza
where the bonfire was to be. She did not think the
February breeze cold enough to demand further covering
than her green woolen dress. A mantle would have been
oppressive, for it would have hidden a new necklace and
a new clasp, mounted with silver, the only ornamental
presents Tito had ever made her. Tessa did not think at
all of showing her figure, for no one had ever told her it
was pretty; but she was quite sure that her necklace and
36

4:0'Z KOMOLA.

clasp were of the prettiest sort ever worn by the richest
contadina, and she arranged her white hood over her head
so that the front of her necklace might be well displayed.
These ornaments, she considered, must inspire respect for
her as the wife of some one who could afford to buy them.
She tripped along very cheerily in the February sunshine,
thinking much of the purchases for the little ones, with
which she was to fill her small basket, and not thinking at
all of any one who might be observing her. Yet her
descent from her upper story into the street had been
watched, and she was being kept in sight as she walked by
a person who had often waited in vain to see if it were not
Tessa who lived in that liouse to which he had more than
once dogged Tito. Baldassarre was carrying a package of
yarn : he was constantly employed in that way, as a means
of earning his scanty bread, and keeping the sacred fire of
vengeance alive; and he had come out of his way this
morning, as he had often done before, that he might pass
by the house to which he had followed Tito in the evening.
His long imprisonment had so intensified his timid suspi-
cion and his belief in some diabolic fortune favoring Tito,
that he had not dared to pursue him, except under cover
of a crowd or of the darkness; he felt, with instinctive
horror, that if Tito's eyes fell upon him, he should again
be held up to obloquy, again be dragged away; his weapon
would be taken from him, and he should be cast heljoless
into a prison-cell. His fierce purpose had become as stealthy
as a serpent's, which depends for its prey on one dart of
the fang. Justice was weak and unfriended; and he could
not hear again the voice that pealed the promise of ven-
geance in the Duomo; he had been there again and again,
but that voice, too, had apparently been stifled by cunning
strong-armed wickedness. For a long while Baldassarre's
ruling thought was to ascertain whether Tito still wore
the armor, for now at last his fainting hope would
have been contented with a successful stab on this side
the grave; but he would never risk his precious knife
again. It was a weary time he had had to wait for the
chance of answering this question by touching Tito's back
in the press of the street. Since then, the knowledge that
the sharp steel was useless, and that he had no hope but in
some new device, had fallen with leaden weight on his
enfeebled mind. A dim vision of winning one of those
two wives to aid him came before him continually, and
continually slid away. The wife who had lived on the

TESSA ABROAD AXD AT HOME. 403

hill Avas no longer there. If he could find her again, he
might grasp some thread of a project, and work his way to
more clearness.

And this morning he had succeeded. He was quite cer-
tain now where this wife lived, and as he walked, bent a
little under his burden of 3'arn, yet keeping the green and
white figure in sight, his mind was dwelling upon her and
her circumstances as feeble eyes dwell on lines and colors,
trying to interpret them into consistent significance.

Tessa had to pass through various long streets without
seeing any other sign of the Carnival than unusual groups
of the country people in their best garments, and that dis-
position in everybody to chat and loiter which marks the
early hours of a holiday, before the spectacle has begun.
Presently, in her disapjiointed search for remarkable
objects, her eyes fell on a man with a peddler's basket
before him, who seemed to be selling nothing but little
red crosses to all the passengers. A little red cross
would be pretty to hang up over her bed; it would also
help to keep off harm, and would perhaps make Ninna
stronger. Tessa went to the other side of the street that
she might ask the peddler the price of the crosses, fearing
that they would cost a little too much for her to spare
from her purchase of sweets. The peddlers back had been
turned toward her hitherto, but when she came near him
she recognized an old acquaintance of the Mercato, Bratti
Ferravecchi, and, accustomed to feel that she was to avoid
old acquaintances, she turned away again and passed to
the other side of the street. But Bratti's eye was too well
practiced in looking out at the corner after possible cus-
tomers, for her movement to have escaped him, and she
was presently arrested by a tap on the arm from one of the
red crosses.

"Young woman," said Bratti, as she iinwillingly turned
her head, "you come from some castello a good way oil,
it seems to me, else you'd never think of walking about
this blessed Carnival, without a red cross in your hand.
Santa Madonna! Four white quattrini is a small price to
pay for j^our soul — prices rise in purgatory, let me tell
you."

"Oh, I should like one," said Tessa, hastily, "but I
couldn't spare four white quattrini."

Bratti had at first regarded Tessa too abstractedly as a
mere customer to look at her with any scrutiny, but when
she began to speak he exclaimed, " By the head of San

404 EOMOLA.

Giovanni, it must be the little Tessa, and looking as fresh
as a ripe apple! What! 3'ou've done none the worse, then,
for running away from father Nofri? You were in the
right of it, for he goes on crutches now, and a crabbed
fellow witli crutches is dangerous; he can reach across the
house and beat a woman as he sits."

"I'm married/' said Tessa, ratber demurely, remember-
ing Naldo's command that she shoidd behave with gravity;
"and my husband takes great care of me."

"Ah, then, you've fallen on your feet! Nofri said you
were good-for-nothing vermin; but what then? An ass
may bray a good while before he shakes the stars down. I
always said you did well to run away, and it isn't often
Bratti's in the wrong. Well, and so you've got a husband
and plenty of money? Then you'll never think much of
giving four white quattrini for a red cross. I get no profit;
but what with the famine and the new religion, all other
merchandise is gone down. You live in the country where
the chestnuts are plentj-, eh? You've never wanted for
polenta, I can see."

"No, I've never wanted anything," said Tessa, still on
her guard.

"Then you can afford to buy a cross. I got a Padre to
bless them, and you get blessing and all for four quat-
trini. It isn't for the profit; I hardly get a danaro by the
whole lot. But then they're holy wares, and it's getting
harder and harder work to see your way to Paradise; the
very Carnival is like Holy Week, and the least you can do
to keep the Devil from getting the upper hand is to buy a
cross. God guard you ! think what the Devil's tooth is I
You've seen him biting the man in San Giovanni, I should
hope?"

Tessa felt much teased and frightened. " Oh, Bratti,"
she said, with a discomposed face. "I want to buy a
great many confetti: I've got little Lillo and Ninna at
home. And nice-colored sweet things cost a great deal.
And they will not like the cross so well, though I know it
would be good to have it."

" Come, then," said Bratti, fond of laying up a store of
merits by imagining possible extortions and then heroic-
ally renouncing them, "since you're an old acquaintance,
you shall, have it for two quattrini. It's making you a
present of tlie cross, to say nothing of the blessing."

Tessa was reaching out her two quattrini with trembli^ig

TESSA ABROAD AND AT HOME. 405

hesitation, when Bratti said abruptly, " Stop a bit! Where
do you live?"

" Oh, a long way off," she answered, almost automatic-
ally, being preoccupied with her quattrini; "beyond San
Ambrogio, in the Via Piccola, at the top of the house
where the wood is stacked below."

"Very good," said Bratti, in a patronizing tone; "then
I'll let you have the cross on trust, and call for the money.
So you live inside the gates? Well, I shall be passing."
"No, no!" said Tessa, frightened lest Naldo should be
angry at this revival of an old acquaintance. "' I can spare
the money. Take it now."

"No," said Bratti, resolutely; "I'm not a hard-hearted
peddler. I'll call and see if you've got any rags, and you
shall make a bargain. See, here's the cross: and there's
Pippo's shop not far behind you: you can go and fill your
basket, and I must go and get" mine empty. Addio,
piccina."

Bratti went on his way, and Tessa, stimulated to change
her money into confetti^efore further accident, went into
Pippo's shop, a little fluttered by the thought that she had
let Bratti know more about her tlian her husband would
approve. There were certainly more dangers in coming to
see the Carnival than in staying at home; and she would
have felt this more strongly if she had known that the
wicked old man, who had wanted to kill her husband on
the hill, was still keeping her in sight. But she had not
noticed the man with the burden on his back.

The consciousness of having a small basketful of things
to make the children glad, dispersed her anxiety, and as
she entered the Via de Libraj her face had its usual expres-
sion of child-like content. And now she thought there
was really a procession coming, for she saw white robes and
a banner, and her heart began to palpitate with expecta-
tion. She stood a little aside, but in that narrow street
there was the pleasure of being obliged to look very close.
The banner was pretty: it was the Holy Mother with the
Babe, whose love for her Tessa had believed in more and
more since she had had her babies; and the figures in white
had not only green wreaths on their heads, but little red
crosses by their side, which caused her some satisfaction
that she also had her red cross. Certainly, they looked as
beautiful as the angels on the clouds, and to Tessa's mmd
they too had a background of cloud, like everything else
that came to her in life. How and whence did they come?

406 ROMOLA.

She did not mind much about knowing. But one thing
surprised her as newer than wreaths and crosses; it was
that some of the white figures carried baskets between
them. What could the baskets be for?

But now they were very near, and, to lier astonishment,
they wlieeled aside and came straiglit up to her. She
trembled as she would have done if St. Michael in the pict-
ure had shaken his head at her, and was conscious of noth-
ing but terrified wonder till she saw close to her a round
boyish face, lower than her own, and heard a treble voice
saying, " Sister, you carry the Anathema about you. Yield
it up to the blessed Gesu, and He will adorn you with the
gems of His grace."

Tessa was only more frightened, understanding nothing.
Her first conjecture settled on her basket of sweets. They
wanted that, these alarming angels. Oh, dear, dear! She
looked down at it.

"No, sister," said a taller youth, pointing to her neck-
lace and the clasp of her belt, "it is those vanities that are
the Anathema. Take off that necklace and unclasp that
belt, that they may be burned in the holy Bonfire of Vani-
ties, and save yoti from burning."

"It is the truth, my sister, " said a still taller youth,
evidently the archangel of this band. " Listen to these
voices speaking the divine message. You already carry a
red cross: let that be your only adornment. Yield up
your necklace and belt, and you shall obtain grace."

This was too much. Tessa, overcome with awe, dared
not say "no," but she was equally unable to render up her
beloved necklace and clasp. Her pouting lips were quiver-
ing, the tears rushed to her eyes, and a great drop fell.
For a moment she ceased to see anything; she felt nothing
but confused terror and misery. Suddeiily a gentle hand
was laid on her arm, and a soft, wonderful voice, as if the
Holy Madonna were speaking, said, "Do not be afraid;
no one shall harm you."

Tessa looked up and saw a lady in black, with a young,
heavenly face and loving hazel eyes. She had never seen
any one like this lady before, and under other circum-
stances might have had awestruck thoughts about her;
but now everything else was overcome by the sense that
loving protection was near her. The tears only fell the
faster, relieving her swelling heart, as she looked uj) at the
heavenly face, and, putting her hand to her necklace, said
sobbingly —

TESSA ABROAD AND AT HOME. 407

"I can't give them to be burned. 2dy husband — he
bought them for me — and they are so pretty — and Ninna —
oh, I wish I'd never come I "

" Do not ask her for them/' said Romola, speaking to
the white-robed boys in a tone of mild authority. "It
answers no good end for people to give up such things
against their will. That is not what Fra Girolamo
approves: he would have such things given up freely."

Madonna Romola's word was not to be resisted, and the
Avhite train moved on. They even moved with haste, as if
some new object had caught their eyes; and Tessa felt
Avith bliss tluit they were gone, and that her necklace and
clasD were still with her.

"Oh, I will go back to the house," she said, still agi-
tated; " I will go nowhere else. But if I should meet
them again, and you not be there?" she added, expecting
everything from this heavenly lady.

"Stay a little," said Romola. " Come with me under
this doorway, and we will hide the necklace and clasp, and
then you will be in no danger."

She led Tessa under the archway, and said, "Now, can
we find room for your necklace and belt in your basket?
Ah! your basket is full of crisp things that will break: let
us be careful; and lay the heavy necklace under them."

It was like a change in a. dream to Tessa — the escape
from nightmare into floating safety and joy — to find her-
self taken care of by this lady, so lovely, and powerful,
and gentle. She let Romola unfasten her necklace and
clasp, while she herself did nothing but look up at the face
that bent over her.

" They are sweets for Lillo and Ninna," she said, as
Romola carefully lifted up tlie light parcels in the basket,
and placed the ornaments below them.

"Those are your children?" said Romola, smiling.

"And you would rather go home to them than see
any more of the Carnival? Else you have not far to go to
the Piazza de Signori, and there you would see the pile for
the great bonfire."

" Xo, oh, no I" said Tessa, eagerly; "I shall never like
bonfires again. I will go back."

"You live at some castello, doubtless," said Romola,
not waiting for an answer. "Toward which gate do
you go?"

"Toward Por' Santa Croce."

" Come, then," said Romola, taking her by the hand

408

EOMOLA.

and leading her to the corner of a street nearly opposite.
" If you go down there," she said, pausing, "you will soon
be in a straight road. And I must leave you now, because
some one else expects me. You will not be frightened.
Your pretty things are quite safe now. Addio."

"Addio, Madonna," said Tessa, almost in a whisper, not
knowing what else would be right to say; and in an instant
the heavenly lady was gone. Tessa turned to catch a last
glimpse, but she only saw the tall gliding figure vanish
round the projecting stonework. So she went on her way
in wonder, longing to be once more safely housed with
Monna Lisa, undesirous of carnivals forevermore.

Baldassarre had kept Tessa in sight till the moment of
her parting with Romola: then he went away with his
bundle of yarn. It seemed to him that he had discerned
a clue which might guide him if he could only grasp the
necessary details firmly enough. He had seen the two
wives together, and the sight had brought to his concep-
tions that vividness which had been wanting before. His
power of imagining facts needed to be reinforced contin-
ually by the senses. The tall wife was the noble and
rightful wife; she had the blood in her that would be
readily kindled to resentment; she would knoAv what
scholarship was, and how it might lie locked in by the
obstructions of the stricken body, like a treasure buried
by earthquake. She could believe him: she would be
inclined to believe him, if he proved to her that her hus-
band was unfaithful. Women cared about that: they
would take vengeance for that. If this wife of Tito's loved
him, she would have a sense of injury which Baldassarre's
mind dwelt on with keen longing, as if it would be the
strength of another Will added to his own, the strength of
another mind to form devices.

Both these waves had been kind to Baldassarre, and their
acts toward him, being bound up with the verv image of
them, had not vanished from his memory; yet the thought
of their pain could not present itself to him as a check.
To him it seemed that pain was the order of the world for
all except the hard and base. If any were innocent, if any
were noble, where could the utmost gladness lie for them?
Where it lay for him — in unconquerable hatred and
triumphant vengeance. But he must be cautious: he must
watch this wife in the Via de Bardi, and learn more of
her; for even here frustration was possible. There was no
power for him now but in patience.

MONNA BKIGIDA^S CONVERSIOJif. 409

CHAPTER LI.

MONNA BKIGIDA's CONVERSION".

When" Romola said that some one else expected her, she
meant her cousin Brigida, but she was far from suspecting
how much that good kinswoman was in need of her.
Returning together toward the Piazza, they had descried
the company of youths coming to a stand before Tessa,
and when Romola, having approached near enough to
see the simple little contadina's distress, said, ''Wait for
me a moment, cousin," Monna Brigida said hastily, '*' Ah,
I will not go on: come for me to Boni's shop— I shall go
back there."

The truth was, Monna Brigida had a consciousness on
the one hand of certain "■ vanities " carried on her person,
and on the other of a growing alarm lest the Piagnoni
should be right in holding that rouge, and false hair, and
pearl embroidery, endamaged the soul. Their serious
view of things filled the air like an odor; nothing seemed
to have exactly the same flavor as it used to have; and
there was the dear child Romola, in her youth and beauty,
leading a life that was uncomfortably suggestive of rigor-
ous demands on woman. A widow at fifty-five whose satis-
faction had been largely drawn from what she thinks of
her own person, and what she believes others think of it,
requires a great fund of imagination to keep her spirits
buoyant. And Monna Brigida had begun to have frequent
struggles at her toilet. If her soul would prosper better
without them, was it really worth while to put on the rouge
and the braids? But when she lifted up the hand-mirror
and saw a sallow face with baggy cheeks, and crows'-
feet that were not to be dissimulated by any simpering
of the lips— when she parted her gray hair, and let it
lie in simple Piagnone fashion round her face, her cour-
age failed. Monna Berta would certainly burst out laugh-
ing at her, and call her an old hag, and as Monna Berta
was really only fifty-two, she had a superiority which
would make the observation cutting. Every woman who
was not a Piagnone would give a shrug at the sight of
her, and the men would accost her as if she were their
grandmother. AYhereas, at fifty-five a woman was not
so very old — she only required 'making up a little. So

410 ROMOLA.

the rouge and the braids and the embroidered berretta
went on again, and Monna Brigida was satisfied with
the accustomed effect; as for her neck, if she covered it
up, people might suppose it was too old to show, and, on
the contrary, with the necklaces round it, it looked
better than Monna Berta's. This very day, Avhen she
was preparing for the Piagnone Carnival, such a struggle
had occurred, and the conflicting fears and longings
which caused the struggle, caused her to turn back and
seek refuge in the druggist's shop rather than encounter
the collectors of the Anathema when Romola was not by
her side. But Monna Brigida was not quite rapid enough
in her retreat. She had been descried, even before she
turned away, by the white-robed boys in the rear of those
wlio wheeled round toward Tessa, and the willingness with
which Tessa was given up was, perhaps, slightly due to the
fact that part of the troop had already accosted a person-
age carrying more markedly upon her the dangerous weight
of the Anathema. It happened that several of this troop
were at the youngest age taken into peculiar training; and
a small fellow of ten, his olive wreath resting above cheru-
bic cheeks and wide brown eyes, his imagination really
possessed with a hovering awe at existence as something
in which great consequences impended on being good or
bad, his longings nevertheless running in the directionof
mastery and mischief, was the first to reach Monna Brigida
and place himself across her path. She felt angry, and
looked for an open door, but there was not one at hand,
and by attempting to escape now, she would only make
things worse. But it was not the cherubic-faced young
one who first addressed her; it was a youth of fifteen, who
held one handle of a wide basket.

"Venerable mother! " he began, " the blessed Jesus com-
mands you to give up the Anathema which you carry upon
you. That cap embroidered with pearls, those jewels that
fasten up your false hair — let them be given up and sold
for the poor; and cast the hair itself away from you, as a
lie that is only fit for burning. Doubtless, too, you have
other jewels under your silk mantle."

"Yes, lady," said the youth at the other handle, who
had many of Fra Girolamo's phrases by heart, "they are
too heavy for you: they are heavier than a millstone, and
are weighting you for perdition. Will you adorn your-
self with the hunger of the poor, and be proud to carry
God's curse upon your head?"

MONNA brigida's co^• veksiok. 411

''In truth you are old, buonu madre," said the clierubic
lioy, in a sweet soprano. ''You look ver}^ ugly with the
red on your cheeks and that black glistening hair, and
those fine things. It is only Satan who can like to see
you. Your Angel is sorry. lie wants you to rub away
tlie red."

The little fellow snatched a soft silk scarf from the
basket, and held it toward Monna Brigida, that she might
use it as her guardian angel desired. Her anger and
mortification were fast giving way to spiritual alarm.
Monna Berta and that cloud of witnesses, highly-dressed
society in general, were not looking at her, and she was
surrounded by young monitors, whose Avhite robes, and
wreaths, and red crosses, and dreadful candor, had some-
thing awful in their unusualness. Her Franciscan con-
fessor, Fra Cristoforo, of Santa Croce, was not at hand to
reinforce her distrust of Dominican teaching, and she was
helplessly possessed and shaken by a vague sense that a
supreme warning was come to her. Unvisited by the least
suggestion of any other course tliat was open to her, she
took the scarf that was held out, and rubbed her cheeks,
with trembling submissiveness.

" It is well, madonna," said the second yonth. " It is a
holy beginning. And when you have taken those vanities
from your head, the dew of heavenly grace will descend on
it." The infusion of mischief was getting stronger, and put-
ting his hand to one of the jeweled pins tliat fastened her
braids to the berretta, he drew it out. The heavy black
plait fell down over Monna Brigida's face, and dragged the
rest of the head-gear forward. It was a new reason for not
hesitating: she put up her hands hastily, undid the other
fastenings, and fiung down into the basket of doom her
beloved crimson velvet berretta, with all its unsurpassed
embroidery of seed-pearls, and stood an unrouged woman,
with gray hair pushed backward from a face where certain
deep lines of age had triumphed over embonpoint.

But the berretta was not allowed to lie in the basket.
With impish zeal the youngsters lifted it, and held it up
pitilessly, with the false hair dangling.

" See, venerable mother," said the taller youth, "what
ugly lies j^ou have d.elivered yourself from I And now you
look like the blessed Saint Anna, the mother of the Holy
Virgin."

Thoughts of going into a conTent forthwith, and never
shov/ing herself in the world again, were rushing through

41.2 ROMOLA.

Monna Brigida's mind. There was nothing possible for
her but to take care of her soul. Of course there were
spectators laughing: she had no need to look round to
assure herself of that. Well! it would, perhaps, be better
to be forced to think more of Paradise. But at the
thought that the dear accustomed world was no longer in
her clioice, there gathered some of those hard tears which
Just moisten elderly eyes, and then she could see but dimly
a large rough hand holding a red cross, which Avas sud-
denly thrust before her over the shoulders of the boys,
while a strong guttural voice said —

" Only four quattrini, madonna, blessing and all I Buy
it. You'll find a comfort in it now your v/ig's gone. Dehl
what are we sinners doing all our lives? Making soup in
a basket, and getting nothing but the scum for our
stomachs. Better buy a blessing, madonna! Only four
quattrini; tlie profit is not so much as the smell of a da-
naro, and it goes to the poor."'

Monna Brigida, m dim-eyed confusion, was proceeding
to the further submission of reaching money from her
embroidered scarsella, at present hidden by her silk mantle,
when the group round her, which she had not yet enter-
tained the idea of escaping, opened before a figure as
welcome as an angel loosing prison bolts.

"^ Eomola, look at me! '' said Monna Brigida, in a piteous
tone, putting out both her hands.

The white trooj) was already moving away, with a slight
consciousness that its zeal about the head-gear had been
superabundant enough to afford a dispensation from any
further demand for i^enitential offerings.

" Dear cousin, don't be distressed," said Romola, smitten
with pity, yet hardly able to help smiling at the sudden
apj^arition of her kinswoman in a genuine, natural guise,
strangely contrasted with all memories of lier. She took
the black drapery from her own head and threw it over
Monna Brigida's. ''There," she went on soothingly,
"no one will remark you now. We will turn down the
Via del Palagio and go straight to our house."

They hastened away, Monna Brigida grasping Romola's
hand tightly, as if to get a stronger assurance of her beiug
actually there.

"Ah, my Romola, my dear child!" said the short fat
woman, hurrying with frequent steps to keep pace with
the majestie young figure beside iier : ••\vbat an old
scarecrow 1 am! I must be sood — I mean to be good!"

MONNA brigida's COJS'VERSION. 413

"Yes, jBs; buy a cross!" said the guttural voice, while
the rough hand was thrust once more before Monna
Brigida: for Bratti was not to be abashed by Eomola's
presence into renouncing a probable customer, and had
quietly followed up their retreat. " Only four quattrini,
blessing and all — and if there was any profit, it would all
go to the poor."

Monna Brigida would have been compelled to pause,
even if she had been in a less submissive mood. She put
up one hand deprecatingly to arrest Eomola's remon-
strance, and with the other reached out a grosso, "worth
many white quattrini, saying, in an entreating tone —

''Take it, good man, and begone."

"You're in the right, madonna," said Bratti, taking
the^ com quickly, and thrusting the cross into her hand;
"I'll not offer you change, for I might as well rob you of
a mass. What! Ave must all be scorched a little, but you'll
come off the easier; better fall from the window than the
roof. A good Easter and a good year to you ! "

"Well, Eomola," cried Monna Brigida, pathetically, as
Bratti left them, "if I'm to be a Piagnone it's no matter
how I look!"

" Dear cousin," said Eomola, smiling at her affectionately,
"you don't know how much better you look than you ever
did before. I see now how good-natured your face is, like
yourself. That red and finery seemed to thrust themselves
forward and hide expression. Ask our Piero or any other
painter if he would not rather paint your portrait now
than before. I think all lines of the human face have
something either touching or grand, unless they seem to
come from low passions. How fine old men are, like my
godfather! Why should not old women look grand and
simple?"

" Yes, when one gets to be sixty, my Eomola," said
Brigida, relapsing a little; "but I'm only fifty-five, and
Monna Berta, and everybody — but it's no use: I will be
good, like you. Your mother, if she'd been alive, would
have been as old as I am; we were cousins together. One
must either die or get old. But it doesn't matter about
being old if one's a Piagnone/'

414 ROMOLA.

CHAPTER LII.

A PROPHETESS.

The incidents of that Carnival day seemed to Romola
to carry no other personal consequences to her than the
new care of supporting poor cousin Brigida in her fluctu-
ating resignation to age and gray hairs; but they intro-
duced'a Lenten time in which she was kept at a high
pitch of mental excitement and active effort,

Bernardo del Nero had been elected Gonfaloniere. By
great exertions the Medicean party had so far triumphed,
and that triumph had deepened Romola^s presentiment of
some secretly-prepared scheme likely to ripen either into
success or betrayal during these two months of her god-
father's authority. Every morning the dim daybreak as
it peered into her room seemed to be that haunting fear
coming back to her. Every morning the fear went with
her as she passed through the streets on her way to the
early sermon in the Duomo: but there she gradually lost
the sense of its chill presence, as men lose the dread of
death in the clash of battle.

In the Duomo she felt herself sharing in a passionate
conflict which had wider relations than any enclosed
within the walls of Florence. For Savonarola was
preaching — preaching the last course of Lenten sermons
he was ever allowed to finish in the Duomo: he knew that
excommunication was imminent, and he had reached the
point of defying it. He held up the condition of the
Church in the terrible mirror of his unflinching speech,
which called things by their right names and dealt in no
polite periphrases; he proclaimed with heightening confi-
dence the advent of renovation — of a moment when there
Avould be a general revolt against corruption. As to iiis
own destiny, he seemed to have a double and alternating
prevision: sometimes he saw himself taking a glorious
part in that revolt, sending forth a voice that would be
heard through all Christendom, and making the dead
body of the Church tremble into new life, as the body of
Lazarus trembled when the Divine voice pierced the sep-
ulchre; sometimes he saw no prospect for himself but
persecution and martyrdom: — this life for him was only a
vigil, and only after death would come the dawn.

A PROPHETESS. 415

The position was one which must liave had its impres-
siveness for all minds that were not of the dullest order,
even if they were inclined, as Macchiavelli was, to inter-
pret the Frate's character by a key that presupposed no
loftiness. To Eomola, whose kindred ardor ^ave her a
firm belief in Savonarola's genuine greatness of purpose,
the crisis was as stirring as if it had been part of her per-
sonal lot. It blent itself as an exalting memory with all
her daily labors; and those labors were calling not only for
difficult perseverance, but for new courage. Famine'^had
never yet taken its flight from Florence, and all distress,
by its long continuance, was getting harder to bear; dis-
ease was spreading in the crowded city, and the Plague was
expected. As Romola walked, often in weariness, among
the sick, the hungry and the murmuring, she felt it good
to be inspired by something more than her pity — by the
belief in a heroism struggling for sublime ends, toward
which the daily action of Tier pity could only tend feebly,
as the dews that freshen the weedy ground to-day tend to
prepare an unseen harvest in the years to come.

But that mighty music which stirred her in the Duomo
Avas not without its Jarring notes. Since those first days
of glowing hope when the Frate, seeing the near triuniioh
of good in the reform of the Republic and the coming of
the French deliverer, had preached j^eace, charity, and
oblivion of jiolitical diiierences, there had been a marked
change of conditions: political intrigue had been too obsti-
nate to allow of the desired oblivion; the belief in the
French deliverer, who had turned his back on his high
mission, seemed to have wrought harm; and hostility, both
on a petty and on a grand scale, was attacking the Prophet
with new weapons and new determination.

It followed that the spirit of contention and self-vindi-
cation pierced more and more conspicuously in his ser-
mons; that he was urged to meet the popular demands not
only by increased insistence and detail concerning visions
and private revelations, but by a tone of defiant confidence
against objectors; and from having denounced the desire
for the miraculous, and declared that miracles had no rela-
tion to true faith, he had come to assert that at the right
moment the Divine power would attest the truth of his
prophetic preaching by a miracle. And continually, in the
rapid transitions of excited feeling, as the vision of tri-
umphant good receded behind the actual predominance of
evilj the threats of coming vengeance against vicious

416 ROMOLA.

tyrants and corrupt priests gathered some impetus from
personal exasperation, as well as from indignant zeal.
• In the career of a great public orator who yields himself
to the inspiration of the moment, that conflict of selfish
and unselfish emotion which in most men is hidden in the
chamber of the soul, is brought into terrible evidence: the
language of the inner voices is written out in letters of fire.

But if the tones of exasperation jarred on Eomola, there
was often another member of Fra Girolamo's audience to
whom they were the only thrilling tones, like the vibration
of deep bass notes to the deaf. Baldassarre had found out
that the wondei'ful Frate was preaching again, and as often
as he could, he went to hear the Lenten sermon, that he
might drink in the threats of a voice which seemed like a
power on the side of justice. He went the more because
he had seen that Komola went too; for he was waiting
and watching for a time when not only outward circum-
stances, but his own varying mental state, would mark
the right moment for seeking an interview with her.
Twice Romola had caught sight of his face in the Duomo —
once when its dark glance was fixed on hers. Slie wished
not to see it again, and yet she looked for it, as men look
for the reappearance of a portent. But any revelation
that might be yet to come about this old man was a subor-
dinate fear now: it referred, she thought, only to the j)ast,
and her anxiety was almost absorbed by the present.

Yet the stirring Lent passed by; Aj)ril, the second and
final month of her godfather's supreme authority, was
near its close; and nothing had occurred "to fulfill her
presentiment. In the public mind, too, there had been
fears, and rumors had spread from Eome of a menacing
activity on the part of Piero de Medici; but in a few days
the suspected Bernardo would go out of power.

Romola was trying to gather some courage from the
review of her futile fears, when on the twenty-seventh, as
she was walking out on her usual errands of mercy in the
afternoon, she was met by a messenger from Camilla
Rucellai, chief among the feminine seers of Florence,
desiring her presence forthwith on matters of the highest
moment. Romola, who shrank with unconquerable repul-
sion from the shrill volubility of those illuminated women,
and had just now a special repugnance toward Camilla
because of a report that she had announced revelations
hostile to Bernardo del Nero, was at first inclined to send
back a flat refusal. Camilla's message might refer to pub-

A PROPHETESS. 417

lie affairs, and Romola's immediate prompting was to close
her ears against knowledge that might only make her
mental burden heavier. But it had become so thoroughly
her habit to reject her impulsive choice, and to obey pas-
sively the guidance of outward claims, that, reproving
herself for allowing her presentiments to make her cow-
ardly and selfish, she ended by compliance, and went
straight to Camilla.

She found the nervous gray-haired woman in a chamber
arranged as much as possible like a convent cell. The
thin fingers clutching Eomola as she sat, and the eager
voice addressing her at first in a loud whisper caused her
a physical shrinking that made it difficult for her to keep
her seat.

Camilla had a vision to communicate — a vision in which
it had been reveftled to her by Eomola's Angel, that
Eomola knew certain secrets concerning her godfather,
Bernardo del Nero, which, if disclosed, might save the
Eepublic from peril. Camilla's voice rose louder and
higher as she narrated her vision, and ended by exhorting
Eomola to obey the command of her Angel, and separate
herself from the enemy of God.

Eomola's impetuosity was that of a massive nature, and,
excepting moments when she was deeply stirred, her man-
ner was calm and self-controlled. She had a consti-
tutional disgust for the shallow excitability of women
like Camilla, whose faculties seemed all wrought up
into fantasies, leaving nothing for emotion or thought.
The exhortation was not yet ended when she started up
and attempted to wrench her arm from Camilla's tighten-
ing grasp. It was of no use. The prophetess kept her
hold like a crab, and, only incited to more eager exhorta-
tion by Eomola^s resistance, was carried beyond her own
intention into a shrill statement of other visions which
were to corroborate this. Christ himself had appeared to
her and ordered her to send his commands to certain
citizens in office that they should throw Bernardo del Nero
from the window of the Palazzo Vecchio. Fra Girolamo
himself knew of it, and had not dared this time to say
that the vision was not of Divine authorit3^

" And since then," said Camilla, in her excited treble,
straining upward with wild eyes toward Eomola's face,
"the Blessed Infant has come to me and laid a wafer of
sweetness on my tongue in token of his pleasure that I
had done his will."
37

418 BOMOLA.

" Let me go ! '* said Romola, in a deep voice of anger.
*' God grant you are madl else you are detestably wicked!"

The violence of her effort to be free was too strong for
Camilla now. She wrenched away her arm and rushed
out of the room, not pausing till she had hurriedly gone
far along the street, and found herself close to the church
of the Badia. She had but to pass behind the curtain
under the old stone arch, and she would find a sanctuary
shut in from the noise and hurry of the street, where all
objects and all uses suggested the thought of an eternal
peace subsisting in the midst of turmoil.

She turned in, and sinking down on the step of the altar
in front of Filippino Lippi's serene Virgin appearing to
St. Bernard, she waited in hope that the inward tumult
which agitated her would by-and-by subside.

The thought which pressed on her the most acutely was
that Camilla could allege Savonarola^s countenance of her
wicked folly. Romola did not for a moment believe that
he had sanctioned the throwing of Bernardo del Nero from
the window as a Divine suggestion; she felt certain that
there was falsehood or mistake in that allegation. Savon-
arola had become more and more severe in his views of
resistance to malcontents; but the ideas of strict law and
order were fundamental to all his political teaching. Still,
since he knew the possibly fatal effects of visions like
Camilla's, since he had a marked distrust of such spirit-
seeing women, and kept aloof from them as much as
possible, why, with his readiness to denounce wrong from
the pulpit, did he not publicly denounce these pretended
revelations which brought new darkness instead of light
across the conception of a Sujireme Will? Why? The
answer came with painful clearness: he was fettered
inwardly by the consciousness that such revelations were
not, in their basis, distinctly sej)arable from his own
visions. He was fettered outwardly by the foreseen conse-
quence of raising a cry against himself even among members
of his own party, as one who would suppress all Divine
inspiration of which he himself was not the vehicle — he or
his confidential and supplementary seer of visions, Fra
Salvestro.

Eomola, kneeling with buried face on the altar-step, was
enduring one of those sickening moments, when the enthu-
siasm which had come to her as the only energy strong
enough to make life worthy, seemed to be inevitably bound
up with vain dreams and willful eye-shutting. Her mind

A PROPHETESS. 419

rushed bcack with a new attraction toward the strong
worldly sense, the dignified prudence, the untheoretic
virtues of her godfather, who was to be treated as a sort
of Agag because he held that a more restricted form of
goyernment was better than the Great Council, and because
he would not pretend to forget old ties to the banished
family.

But with this last thought rose the presentiment of some
plot to restore the Medici; and then again she felt that the
popular party was half justified in its fierce suspicion.
Again she felt that to keep the Government of Florence
pure, and to keep out a vicious rule, was a sacred cause:
the Frate was right there, and had carried her understand-
ing irrevocably with him. But at this moment the assent
of her understanding- went alone; it was given unwillingly.
Her heart was recoiling from a right allied to so much
na,rrowjiess; a right apparently entailing that hard system-
atic judgment of men which measures tliem by assents and
denials quite superficial to the manhood within them.
Her affection and respect were clinging with new tenacity
to her godfather, and with him to those memories of her
father which were m the same opposition to the division of
men into sheep and goats by the easy mark of some political
or religious symbol.

After all has been said that can be said about the widen-
ing influence of ideas, it remains true that they would hardly
be such strong agents unless they were taken in a solvent
of feeling. The great world -struggle of developing thought
is continually foreshadowed in the struggle of the affec-
tions, seeking a justification for love and hope.

If Romola^s intellect had been less capable of discerning
the coniplexities in human things, all the early loving
associations of her life would have" forbidden her to accept
implicitly the denunciatory exclusiveness of Savonarola.
She had simply felt that liis mind had suggested deeper
and more efScacious truth to her than any other, and the
large breathing-room she found in his grand view of human
duties had made her patient toward that part of his teach-
ing Avhich she could not absorb, so long as its practical
effect came into collision with no strong force in her. But
now a sudden insurrection of feeling had brought about
that collision. Her indignation, once roused by Camilla's
visions, could not pause there, but ran like an ilhiminating
fire over all the kindred facts in Savonarola's teaching,
and for the moment she felt what was true in the scornful

430 EOMOLA.

sarcasms she heard contimially flung against him, more
keenly than she felt what was false.

But it was an illumination that made all life look ghastly
to her. AVhere were the beings to whom she could cling,
with whom she could work and endure, with the belief
that she was working for the right? On the side from
which moral energy came lay a fanaticism from which she
was shrinking with newly-startled repulsion; on the side
to which she was drawn by affection and memory, there was
the presentiment of some secret plotting, which her judg-
ment told her would not be unfairly called crime. And
still surmounting every other thought was the dread
inspired by Tito's hints, lest that presentiment should be
converted into knowledge, in such a way that she would
be torn by irreconcilable claims.

Calmness would not come even on the altar-steps; it
would not come from looking at the serene picture where
the saint, writing in the rocky solitude, was being visited
by faces with celestial peace in them. Romola M^as in the
hard press of human difficulties, and that rocky solitude
was too far off. She rose from her knees that she might
hasten to her sick jaeople in the courtyard, and by some
immediate beneficent action, revive that sense of worth in
life which at this moment was unfed by any wider faith.
But when she turned round, she found herself face to face
with a man who was standing only two yards off her. The
man was Baldassarre.

CHAPTER LIII.

ON SAN MINIATO,

'^I WOULD speak with you," said Baldassarre, as Romola
looked at him in silent expectation. It was plain that he
had followed her, and had been waiting for her. She was
going at last to know the secret about him.

"Yes," she said, with the same sort of submission that
she might have sliown under an imposed penance. " But
you wish to go where no one can hear us?"

"AYhore he will not come upon us," said Baldassarre,
turning and glancing behind him timidly. ''Out — in the
air — awav from the streets."

ox SAX MIXIATO. 431

*'I sometimes go to Sun Miniato at this hour," said
Eomola. '^f you like, I will go now, and you can follow
me. It is far, but we can be solitary there."

He nodded assent, and Eomola set" out. To some women
it might have seemed an alarming risk to go to a compara-
tively solitary spot with a man who had some of the
outward signs of that madness which Tito attributed to
him. But Romola was not given to personal ftnirs, and
she was glad of the distance that interposed some delay
before another blow fell on her. The afternoon was far
advanced, and the sun was- already low in the west, when
she paused on some rough ground in the shadow of the
cypress-trunks, and looked round for Baldassarre. He was
not far off, but when he reached her he was glad to sink
down on an edge of stony earth. His thick-set frame had
no longer the sturdy vigor which belonged to it when he
first appeared with the rope round him in the Duomo;
and under the transient tremor caused by the exertion of
walking up the hill, his eyes seemed to have a more helpless
vagueness.

"The hill is steep," said Eomola, with compassionate
gentleness, seating herself by him. ''And I fear vou have
been weakened by want."

He turned his head and fixed his eyes on her in silence,
unable, now the moment of speech was come, to seize the
words tliat would convey the thought he wanted to utter;
and she remained as modonless as she could, lest he should
suppose her impatient. He looked like nothing higher
than a common-bred, neglected old man, but she was used
now to be very near to such people, and to think a great
deal about their troubles. Gradually his glance gathered
a more definite expression, and at last he said with abrupt
emphasis —

"Ahl you would have been my daughter I"

The swift flush came in Romola's face and went back
again as swiftly, leaving her with white lips a little apart,
like a marble image of horror. For her mind, the revela-
tion was made. She divined the facts that lay behind that
single word, and in the first moment there" could be no
check to the impulsive belief which sprang from her keen
experience of Tito^'s nature. The sensitive response of
her face was a stimulus to Baldassarre; for the first time
his words had wrought their right effect. He went on
\vit]i gathei-ing eagerness and firmness, laying his hand on
her arm.

432 ROMOLA.

"You are a woman of proud blood — is it not true?
You go to hear the preacher; you hate baseness — baseness
that smiles and triumphs. You hate your husband?"

" Oh, God! were you really his father? " said Eomola, in
a low voice, too entirely possessed by the images of the
past to take any note of Buldassarre's question. '' Or was
it as he said? Did yon take him when lie was little?"

"Ah, you believe me — you know what he isl" said
Baldassarre, exultingly, tigiitening the pressure on her
arm, as if the contact gave him power. " You will help
me?"

" Yes," said Romola, not interpreting the words as he
meant them. She laid her palm gently on the rough
hand that grasped her arm, and the tears came to her eyes
as she looked at him. " Oh, it is piteous I Tell me — you
were a great scholar; you taught him. Hoiv is it?"

She broke off. Tito's allegation of this man's madness
had come across her; and where were the signs even of
past refinement? But she had the self-command not to
move her hand. She sat perfectly still, waiting to listen
with new caution.

"It is gone I — it is all gone I " said Baldassarre; " and
they would not believe me, because he lied, and said I was
mad; and they had me dragged to prison. And I am
old — my mind will not come back. And the world is
against me."

He paused a moment, and his eyes sank as if he were
under a Avave of desi:)ondency. Then he looked up at her
again, and said with renewed eagerness —

" But you are not against me. He made you love him,
and he has been false to you; and you hate him. Yes, he
made me love him: he was beautiful and gentle, and I was
a lonely man. I took him when they were beating him.
He sle})t in my bosom when he was little, and I watched
him as he grew, and gave him all my knowledge, and every-
thing that was mine I meant to be his. I had many things:
money, and books, and gems. He had my gems — he sold
them; and he left me in slavery. He never came to seek
me, and when I came back poor and in misery, he denied
me. He said I was a madman."

"He told us his father was dead — was drowned," said
Romola, faintly. " Surely he must have believed it then.
Oh I he could not have been so base then !"

A vision had risen of what Tito was to her in those first
days when she thought no more of wrong in him than a

ON SAN MINIATO. 423

child thinks of poison in flowers. The yearning reo-ret that
lay m that memory brought some relief from^he^tfnfon
of Jiorror. With one great sob the tears rushed forth

.lo. ' ^^°'lf '^ ^^'^''^.^' ''''^ ^^^6 *ears come easily/' said Bal-
lassarre with some impatience. - But tears Ive no good •

works. Tears will hinder us. Listen to me."

Komola turned toward him with a slight start. Again
the possibility of his madness had darted through her
mmd, and checked tlie rush of belief. If, after afl this
man were only a mad assassin? But her deep belief in Is
tory sti 1 lay behind and it was more in synipathy than in
feai^that she avoided the risk of paining £im' by any show

"Tell me/' she said, as gently as she could, ''how did
you lose your memory— your scholarship."

"I was ill. I can't tell how long -it was a blank. I
remember nothing, only at last I was sitting in the sun
.Z^f t^ie/t?nes and everything else was da^^kness. And
slowly, and by degrees, I felt something besides that: a
longmgforsomething-I did not know Ihat-that ne^e?
caine. And when I was m the ship on the waters I began
baet il : '^^ longed for; it was for the Boy to come
back-It was to find all my thoughts again, for I was
locked away outside them all. And I am Sutside now. I
feel nothing but a wall and darkness."

silP^fpp f !r ' ^'f^ i''T^ '^''''^^^^' ^§'^^^^ a^^ sank into
Son n?V 1 1^.^"' l\ead between his hands; and again

doubt T^'^-f^"" ^T V-^'^'^^^^^'g^^l ^^^ cautioning
doubts The pity with which she dwelt on his word!
seemed like the revival of an old pang. Had she not daily
seen how her father missed Dino and the future he had
dreamed of m that son?

"It all came back once,"Baldassarre went on presently.

1 was master of everything. I saw all the world again,
and my gems, and my books; and I thought I had him in
niy power, and I went to expose him where — where the
lights were and the trees; and he lied again, and said I was

maa, and they dragged me away to prison Wickedness

IS strong; and he wears armor."

The fierceness had flamed up again. He spoke with his
tormer intensity, and again he grasped Romola's arm.

But you will help me? He has been false to you too.
tie has another wife, and she has children. He makes her

424: ROMOLA.

believe he is her husband, and she is a foolish, helpless
thing. I will show you where she lives."

The first shock that passed through Romola was visibly
one of anger. The woman's sense of indignity was inevi-
tably foremost. Baldassarre instinctively felt her in sym-
pathy with him.

" You liate him," he went on. ''Is it not true? There
is no love between you; I know that. I know Avomen can
hate; and you have proud blood. You hate falseness,
and you can love revenge."

Komola sat paralyzed by the shock of conflicting feelings.
She was not conscious of the grasp that was bruising her
tender arm.

" You shall contrive it," said Baldassarre, presently, in
an eager whisper. " I have learned by heart that you are
his rightful wife. You are a noble woman. You go to
hear the preacher of vengeance; you will help justice.
But you will think for me. My mind goes — everything
goes sometimes — all but the fire. The fire is God: it is
justice: it will not die. Y"ou believe that — is it not true?
If they will not hang him for robbing me, you will take
away his armor — 3^ou will make liim go without it, and I
will stab him. I have a knife, and my arm is still strong-
enough."

He put his hand under his tunic, and reached out the
hidden knife, feeling the edge abstractedly, as if he needed
the sensation to keep alive his ideas.

It seemed to Eomola as if every fresh hour of her life
were to become more difficult than the last. Her judg-
ment was too vigorous and rapid for her to fall into the
mistake of using futile deprecatory words to a man in
Baldassarre's state of mind. She chose not to answer his
last speech. She would win time for his excitement to
allay itself by asking something else that she cared to
know. She spoke rather tremulously —

"You say slie is foolish and helpless — that other wife--
and believes him to be her real husband. Perhaps he is:
perhaps he married her before he married me."

" I cannot tell," said Baldassarre, pausing in that action
of feeling the knife, and looking bewildered. ''I can
remember no more. I ouly know where she lives. You
shall see lier. I will take "you; but not now," he added
hurriedly, "he may be there. The night is coming on."

" It is true," said Homola, starting up with a sudden

THE EVENTXG AND THE M0ENI2<fG. 425

consciousness that the sun had set and the hills were
darkening; ''but you will come and take me — when?'^

" In the morning/' said Baldassarre, dreaming that she,
too, wanted to hurry to her vengeance.

"Come to me, then, where you came to me to-day, in
the church. I will be there at ten; and if you are not
there, I will go again toward midday. Can you remem-
ber?"

"Midday," said Baldassarre —" only midday. The
same place, and midday. And, after that," he added,
rising and grasping her arm again with his left hand, while
he held the knife in his right ^ "we will have our revenge.
He shall feel the sharp edge of justice. The world is
against me, but you will help me."

" I would help you in other ways," said Komola, making
a first timid effort to dispel his illusion about her. "I
fear you are in want; you have to labor, and get little. I
should like to bring you comforts and make you feel again
that there is some one who cares for you."

" Talk no more about that," said Baldassarre, fiercely.
" I will have nothing else. Help me to wring one drop of
vengeance on this side of the grave. I have nothing but
my knife. It is sharp; but there is a moment after the
thrust when men see the face of death,— and it shall be my
face that he will see."

He loosed his hold, and sank down again in a sitting
posture. Komola felt helpless: she must defer all inten-
tions till the morrow.

"Midday, then," she said, in a distinct voice.

"Yes," he answered, with an air of exhaustion. " Go;
I will rest here."

She hastened away. Turning at the last spot whence he
was likely to be in sight, she saw him seated still.

CHAPTER LIV.

THE EVENING AND THE MORNING.

RoiiOLA had a purpose in her mind as she was hastening
away; a purpose which had been growing through the
afternoon hours like a side-stream, rising higher and
higher along with the mam current. It was less a resolve
than a necessity of her feeling. Heedless of the darkening

426 EOMOLA.

streets, and not caring to call for Maso's slow escort, she
hurried across the bridge where the river showed itself
black before the distant dying red, and took the most
direct way to the Old Palace. She might encounter her
husband there. No matter. She could not weigh prob-
abilities; she must discharge her heart. She did not know
what she passed in the pilhired court or up the wide stairt^;
she only knew that she asked an usher for the Gonfaloniere,
giving her name, and begging to be shown into a private
room.

She was not left long alone with the frescoed figures and
the newly-lit tapers. Soon the door opened, and Bernardo
del Nero entered, still carrying his white head erect above
his silk lucco.

"Komola, my child, what is this?" he said, in a tone of
anxious surprise, as he closed the door.

She had uncovered her head and went toward him with-
out speaking. He laid his hand on her shoulder, and held
her a little way from him that he might see her better.
Her face was haggard from fatigue and long agitation, her
hair had rolled down in disorder; but there was an excite-
ment in her eyes that seemed to have triumphed over the
bodily consciousness.

"What has he done?" said Bernardo, abruptly. ''Tell
me everything, child; throw away pride. I am your
father."

" It is not about myself — nothing about myself," said
Romola, hastily. " Dearest godfather, it is about you. I
have heard things — some I cannot tell you. But you are
in danger in the palace; you are in danger everywhere.
There are fanatical men who would harm you, and — and
there are traitors. Trust nobody. If you trust, you will
be betrayed."

Bernardo smiled.

" Have you worked yourself up into this agitation, my
poor child," he said, raising his hand to her head and pat-
ting it gently, " to tell such old truth as that to an old
man like me?"

" Oh, no, no! they are not old truths that I mean," said
Romola, pressing her clasped hands painfully together, as
if that action would help her to suppress what must not
be told. " They are fresh things that I know, but can-
not tell. Dearest godfather, you know I am not foolish.
I would not come to you without reason. Is it too lute to
warn you against any one, every one who seems to be

THE EVENIXG AND THE MORNING. 4:27

working on your side? Is it too late to say, 'Go to your
villa and keep away in the country when these three more
days of office are over?' Oh, God! perhaps it is too late!
and if any harm comes to you, it will be as if I had done
it!"

The last words had burst from Eomola involuntarily:
a long-stifled feeling had found spasmodic utterance. But
she herself was startled and arrested.

"I mean," she added, hesitatingly, "I know nothing
positive. I only know what fills me with fears."

"Poor child!" said Bernardo, looking at her with quiet
penetration for a moment or two. Then he said: "Go,
Eomola — go home and rest. These fears may be only big
ugly shadows of something very little and harmless. Even
traitors must see their interest in betraying; the rats will
run where they smell the cheese, and there is no knowing
yet which way the scent will come."

_ He paused, and turned away his eyes from her with an
air of abstraction, till, with a^slow shrug, he added —

"As for warnings, they are of no use to me, child.
I enter into no plots, but I never forsake my colors. If I
march abreast with obstinate men, who will rush on guns
and pikes, I must share the consequences. Let us say no
more about that. I have not many years left at"' the
bottom of my sack for them to rob me of. Go, child;
go home and rest."

He put his hand on her head again caressingh^, and she
could not help clinging to his arm, and pressing her brow
against his shoulder. Her godfather's caress seemed the
last thing that was left to her out of that young filial life,
which now looked so happy to her even in "its troubles, for
they were troubles untaint"ed by anything hateful.

"Is silence best, my Eomola?" said the old man.

" Yes, now; but I cannot tell whether it always will be,"
she answered, hesitatingly, raising her head with an appeal-
ing look.

"Well, you have a father's ear while I am above
ground" — he lifted the black drapery and folded it round
her head, adding — "and a father's home; remember that."
Then opening the door, he said: " There, hasten away.
You are like a black ghost; you will be safe enough."

When Eomola fell asleep that night, she slept deep.
Agitation had reached its limits; she must gather strength
before she could sufl'er more; and, in spite of rigid habit,
she slept on far beyond sunrise.

4:28 ROMOLA.

When she awoke, it was to the sound of gims. Piero cle
Medici, with thirteen hundred men at his back, was before
the gate that looks toward Rome.

So mucli Romohi learned from Maso, with man}' circum-
stantial additions of dubioiTS quality, A country-man had
come in and alarmed the Signoria before it was light, else
the city would have been taken by surprise. His master
was not in the house, having been summoned to the Palazzo
long ago. She sent out the old man again, that he might
gather news, while she went up to the loggia from time to
time to try and discern any signs of the dreaded entrance
having been made, or of its having been effectively repelled,
Maso brought her word that the great Piazza was full of
armed men, and that many of the chief citizens suspected
as friends of the Medici had been summoned to the palace
and detained there. Some of the peojDle seemed not to
mind v^hether Piero got in or not, and some said the Sig-
noria itself had invited him; but however that might be,
they were giving him an ugly welcome; and the soldiers
from Pisa were coming against him.

In her memory of those morning hours, there were not
many things that Romola could distinguish as actual exter-
nal experiences standing markedly out above the tumultu-
ous waves of retrospect and anticipation. She knew that
she had really walked to the Badia by the appointed time
in spite of street alarms; she knew that she had waited
there in vain. And the scene she had witnessed when she
came out of the church, and stood watching on the steps
while the doors were being closed behind her for the after-
noon interval, always came back to her like a remembered
waking.

There was a change in the faces and tones of the people,
armed and unarmed, who were pausing or hurrying along
the streets. The guns were firing again, but the sound
only provoked laughter. She soon knew the cause of the
change. Piero de Medici and his horsemen had turned
their backs on Florence, and were galloping as fast as they
could along the Siena road. She learned this from a sub-
stantial shopkeeping Piagnone, who had not yet laid down
his pike.

"'It is true," he ended, with a certain bitterness in his
emphasis. '' Piero is gone, but there are those left behind
who were in the secret of his coming — we all know that;
and if the new Signoria does its duty we shall soon know
who they are."

WAITING. 429

The words darted through Eomola like a. sharp spasm;
but the evil they foreshadowed was not yet close upon her,
and as she entered her home again, her most pressing
anxiety was the possibility that she had lost sight for a long
while of Baldassarre.

CHAPTEK LV.

WAITING.

The lengthening sunny days went on without bring-
ing either what Romola most desired or what she
most dreaded. They brought no sign from Baldassarre,
and, in spite of special watch on the part of the Govern-
ment, no revelation of the suspected conspiracy. But
they brought other things which touched her closely, and
bridged the phantom-crowded space of anxiety with active
sympathy in immediate trial. They brought the spreading
Plague and the Excommunication of Savonarola.

Both these events tended to arrest her incipient aliena-
tion from the Frate, and to rivet again her attachment
to the man who had opened to her the new life of duty,
and who seemed now to be worsted in the fight for
principle against profligacy. For Eomola could not carry
from day to day into the abodes of pestilence and mis-
ery the sublime excitement of a gladness that, since such
anguish existed, she too existed to make some of the anguish
less bitter, without remembering that she owed this
transcendent moral life to Era Girolamo. She could not
witness the silencing and excommunication of a man
whose distinction from the great mass of the clergy lay,
not in any heretical belief, not in his superstitions, but in
the energy with which he sought to make the Christian
life a reality, without feeling herself drawn strongly to
his side.

Ear on in the hot days of June, the Excommunication,
for some weeks arrived from Rome, was solemnly published
in the Duomo. Romola went to witness the scene, that the
resistance it inspired might invigorate that sympathy with
Savonarola which was one source of her strength. It was
in memorable contrast with the scene she had been accus-
tomed to witness there.

430 BOMOLA.

Instead of upturned citizen-faces filling the vast area
under the morning light, the youngest rising amphithea-
tre-wise toward the walls, and making a garland of hope
around the memories of age — instead of the mighty voice
thrilling all hearts with the sense of great things, visible
and invisible, to be struggled for— there were the bare walls
at evening made more sombre by the glimmer of tapers; there
was the black and gray flock of monks and secular clergy
with bent, unexpectant faces; there was the occasional
tinkling of little bells in the pauses of a monotonous voice
reading a sentence which had already been long hanging
up in the churches; and at last there was the extinction of
the tapers, and the slow, shuffling tread of monkish feet
departing in the dim silence.

Romola's ardor on the side of the Frate was doubly
strengthened by the gleeful triumph she saw in hard and
coarse faces, and by the fear-stricken confusion in the faces
and speech of many among his stronglv-attached friends.
The question where the duty of obedience ends, and the
duty of resistance begins, could in no case be an easy one;
but it was made overwhelmingly difficult by the belief that
the Church was — not a compromise of parties to secure a
more or less approximate justice in the appropriation of
funds, but — a living organism, instinct with Divine power
to bless and to curse. To most of the pious Florentines.
who had hitherto felt no doubt in their adherence to the
Frate, that belief in the Divine potency of the Church was
not an embraced opinion, it was an inalienable impression,
like the concavity of the blue firmament; and the boldness
of Savonarola's written arguments that the Excommunica-
tion was unjust, and that, being unjust, it was not valid, only
made them tremble the more, as a defiance cast at a m3'stic
image, against whose subtle immeasurable power there Avas
neither weapon nor defense.

But Romola, whose mind had not been allowed to draw
its early nourishment from the traditional associations of
the Christian community m which her father had lived a
life apart, felt her relation to the Church only through
Savonarola; his moral force had been the only authority
to which she had bowed; and in his excommunication she
only saw the menace of hostile vice: on one side she saw a
man whose life was devoted to the ends of public virtue
and spiritual purity, and on the other the assault of
alarmed selfishness, headed by a lustful, greedy, lying, and
murderous old man, once called Rodrigo Borgia;, and now

WAITING. 431

lifted to the pinnacle of infamy as Pope Alexander VI.
The finer shades of fact which soften the edge of such
antitheses are not aj^t to be seen except by neutrals, who
are not distressed to discern some folly in martyrs and some
judiciousness in the men who burned them.

But Eomola required a strength that neutrality could
not give; and this Excommunication, which simplified
and ennobled the resistant position of Savonarola by bring-
ing into prominence its wider relations, seemed to come to
her like a rescue from the threatening isolation of criticism
and doubt. The Frate was now withdrawn from that
smaller antagonism against Florentine enemies into which
he continually fell in the unchecked excitement of the
pulpit, and presented himself simply as appealing to the
Christian world against a vicious exercise of ecclesiastical
230wer. He was a standard-bearer leaping into the breach.
Life never seems so clear and easy as when the heart is
beating faster at the sight of some generous self-risking
deed. We feel no doubt then what is the highest prize
the soul can win; we almost believe in our own power to
attain it. By a new current of such enthusiasm Komola
was helped through these difficult summer days. She had
ventured on no words to Tito that would aj^prise him of
her late interview with Baldassarre, and the revelation he
had made to her. What would such words win from
him? No admission of the truth; nothing, probably, but a
cool sarcasm about her sympathy with his assassin. Baldas-
sarre was evidently helpless: the thing to be feared was,
not that he should injure Tito, but that Tito, coming
upon his traces, should carry out some new scheme for
ridding himself of the injured man who was a haunting
dread to him. Romola felt that she could do nothing
decisive until she had seen Baldassarre again, and learned
the full truth about that ''other wife" — learned whether
she were the wife to whom Tito was first bound.

The possibilities about that other wife, which involved
the worst wound to her hereditary pride, mingled them-
selves as a newly-embittering suspicion with the earliest
memories of her illusory love, eating away the lingering
associations of tenderness with the past image of her hus-
band; and her irresistible belief in the rest of Baldassarre's
revelation made her shrink from Tito with a horror which
would perhaps have urged some joassionate speech in spite
of herself if he had not been more than usually absent
from home. Like manv of the wealthier citizens in that

432 ROMOLA.

time of pestileDce, he spent the intervals of business cliiefly
in the country: the agreeable Melema was welcome at many
villas, and since Romola had refused to leave the city, he
had no need to provide a country residence of his own.

But at last, in the later days of July, the alleviation of
those public troubles which had absorbed her activity and
much of her thought, left Romola to a less counteracted
sense of her jDersonal lot. Tlie Plague had almost disap-
peared, and the position of Savonarola was made more
hojieful by a favorable magistracy, who were writing
urgent vindicatory letters to Rome on his behalf, entreat-
ing the withdrawal of the Excommunication.

Romola's healthy and vigorous frame was undergoing
the reaction of languor inevitable after continuous excite-
ment and over-exertion; but her mental restlessness would
not allow her to remain at home without peremptorv
occupation, except during the sultry hours. In the cool
of the morning and evening she walked out constantly,
varying her direction as much as possible, with the vague
hope that if Baldassarre were still alive she might encoun-
ter him. Perhaps some illness had brought a new paralysis
of memory, and he had forgotten where she lived — forgotten
even her existence. Tliat was her most sanguine explana-
tion of his non-appearance. The explanation she felt to
be most probable was, that he liad died of the Plague.

CHAPTER LVI.

THE OTHER WIFE.

The morning warmth was already beginning to be rather
oppressive to Romola, when, after a walk along by the
walls on her way from San Marco, she turned toward the
intersecting streets again at the gate of Santa Croce.

The Borgo La Croce was so still, that she listened to her
own footsteps on the pavement in the sunny silence, until,
on approaching a bend in the street, she saw, a few yards
before her, a little cliild not more than three years old,
with no other clothing than his white shirt, pause from a
waddling run and look around him. In the first moment
of coming nearer she could only see his back — a boy's
back, square and sturdy, with a cloud of reddish-brown

THE OTHER WIFE. 433

curls above it; but in the next he turned toward her, and
she could see his dark eyes wide with tears, and his lower
lip pushed up and trembling, while his fat brown fists
clutched his shirt helplessl3\ The glimpse of a tall black
figure sending a shadow over him brought his bewildered
fear to a climax, and a loud crying sob sent the big tears
rolling.

Eomola, with the ready maternal instinct which was one
hidden source of her passionate tenderness, instantly
uncovered her head, and, stooping down on the pavement,
put her arms around him, and her clieek against his, wliile
she spoke to him in caressing tones. At first his sobs
were only the louder, but he made no effort to get away,
and presently the outburst ceased with that strange abrupt-
ness which belongs to childish joys and griefs: his face
lost its distortion, and was fixed in an open-mouthed gaze
at Eomola.

''You have lost yourself, little one," she said, kissing
him. "Never mind! we will find the house again. Per-
haps mamma will meet us."

She divined that he had made his escape at a moment
when the mother's eyes were turned away from him, and
thought it likely that he would soon be followed.

*'0h, what a heavy, heavy boy!" she said, trying to lift
him. "I cannot carry you. Come, then, you must toddle
back by my side."

Tlie parted lips remained motionless in awed silence, and
one brown fist still clutched the shirt with as much tenac-
ity as ever: but the other yielded itself quite willingly to
the wonderful white hand, strong but soft.

''You have a mamma?" said Romola, as they set out,
looking down at the boy with a certain yearning. But he
was mute. A girl under those circumstances might per-
haps have chirped abundantly; not so this square-shoul-
dered little man with the big cloud of curls.

He was awake to the first sign of his whereabout,
however. At the turning by the front of San Ambrogio
he dragged Romola toward it, looking up at her.

_ " Ah, that is the way home, is it?" she said, smiling at
him. He only thrust his head forward and pulled, as an
admonition that they should go faster.

There was still another turning that he had a decided

opinion about, and then Eomola found herself in a short

street leading to open garden ground. It was in front of

a house at the end of this street that the little fellow

434 ROMOLA.

Ijaused, pulling her toward some stone stairs. He had
evidently no wish for her to loose his hand, and she would
not have been willing to leave him without being sure that
she was delivering him to his friends. They mounted
the stairs, seeing but dimly in that sudden withdrawal
from the sunlight, till, at the final landing-place, an extra
stream of light came from an open doorway. Passing
through a small lobby, they came to another open door,
and there Eomola paused. Her approach had not been
heard.

On a low chair at the farther end of the room, opposite
the light, sat Tessa, with one hand on the edge of the
cradle, and her head hanging a little on one side, fast
asleep. Near one of the windows, with her back turned
toward the door, sat Monna Lisa at her work of preparing
salad, in deaf unconsciousness. There was only an instant
for Eomola's eyes to take in that still scene ; for Lillo
snatched his hand away from her and ran up to his
mother's side, not making any direct effort to wake her,
but only leaning his head back against her arm, and sur-
veying Eomola seriously from that distance.

As Lillo pushed against her, Tessa opened her eyes, and
looked up in bewilderment; but her glance had no sooner
rested on the figure at the opposite doorway than she
started up, blushed deeply, and began to tremble a little,
neither speaking nor moving forward.

"Ah! we have seen each other before," said Eomola,
smiling, and coming forward. ''I am glad it was your
little boy. He was crying in the street; I suijpose he had
run away. So we walked together a little way, and then
he knew where he was, and brought me here. But you
had not missed him? That is well, else you would have
been frightened."

The shock of finding that Lillo had run away overcame
every other feeling in Tessa for the moment. Her color
went again, and, seizing Lillo's arm, she ran with him to
Monna Lisa, saying, with a half sob, loud in the old
woman's ear —

*'01i, Lisa, A^ou are wiclcedl Why Avill you stand with
your back to the door? Lillo ran away ever so far into the
street."

"Holy mother!" said Monna Lisa, in her meek, thick
tone, letting the spoon fall from her hands. "Where were
1/0 >/, then? I thought 3^ou were there, and had your eye
on him."

THE OTHER WIFE. 435

''But you know I go to sleep when I am rocking," said
Tessa, in pettish remonstrance.

" Well, well, we must keep the outer door shut, or else
tie him up,'' said Monna Lisa, " for he'll be as canning as
Satan before long, and that's the holy truth. But how
came he back, then?"

This question recalled Tessa to the- consciousness of
Eomola's presence. Without answering, she turned toward
her, blushing and timid again, and Monna Lisa's eyes fol-
lowed her movement. The old woman made a low rever-
ence, and said —

•'Doubtless the most noble lady brought him back."
Then, advancing a little nearer to Romola, she added,
" It's my shame for him to have been found with only his
shirt on; but he kicked, and wouldn't have his other
clothes on this morning, and the mother, poor thing, will
never hear of his being beaten. But what's an old woman
to do without a stick when the lad's legs get so strong?
Let your nobleness look at his legs."

Lillo, conscious that his legs were in question, pulled
his shirt up a little higher, and looked down at their olive
roundness with a dispassionte and curious air. Romola
laughed, and stooped to give him a caressing shake and
kiss, and this action helped the reassurance that Tessa had
already gathered from ^Monna Lisa's address to Romola.
For when Naldo had been told about the adventure at the
Carnival, and Tessa had asked him who the heavenly lady
that had come just when she was w^anted, and had vanished
so soon, was likely to be — whether she could be the Holy
Madonna herself? — he had answered, "Not exactly, my
Tessa; only one of the saints," and had not chosen to say
more. So that in the dream-like combination of small
experience which made up Tessa's thought, Romola had
remained confusedly associated with the pictures in the
churches, and when she reappeared, the grateful remem-
brance of her protection was slightly tinctured with
religious awe — not deeply, for Tessa's dread was chiefly of
ugly and evil beings. It seemed unlikely that good beings
would be angry and punish her, as it was the nature of
IS^ofri and the devil to do. And now that Monna Lisa had
spoken freely about Lillo's legs and Romola had laughed,
Tessa was more at her ease.

" Ninna's in the cradle," she said. '-Site's pretty too."
Romola went to look at the sleeping Ninna, and Monna

436 ROMOLA.

Lisa, one of the exceptionally meek deaf, who never expect
to be spoken to, returned to her salad.

"Ah! she is waking: she has opened her blue eyes,"
said Eomola. " You must take her up, and I will sit
down in this chair — may I ? — and nurse Lillo. Come,
Lillo!"

She sat down in Tito's chair, and put out her arms
toward the lad, whose eyes had folloAved her. He hesitated:
and pointing his small fingers at her with a half-puz-
zled, half-angry feeling, said, "That's Babbo's chair," not
seeing his way out of the diflficulty if Babbo came and
found Eomola in his place.

" But Babbo is not here, and I shall go soon. Come,
let me nurse you as he does," said Eomola, wondering to
herself for the first time what sort of Babbo he was Avhose
wife was dressed in contadina fashion, but had a certain
daintiness about her person that indicated idleness and
plenty. Lillo consented to be lifted up, and, finding the
lap exceedingly comfortable, began to explore her dress
and hands, to see if there were any ornaments besides the
rosary.

Tessa, who had hitherto been occupied in coaxing Ninna
out of her waking peevishness, now sat down in her low
chair, near Eomola's knee, arranging Ninna's tiny person
to advantage, jealous that the strange lady too seemed to
notice the boy most, as Naldo did.

" Lillo was going to be angry with me, because I sat in
Babbo's chair," said Eomola, as she bent forward to kiss
Ninna's little foot. " Will he come soon and want it?"

"Ah, no!" said Tessa, "you can sit in it a long while.
I shall be sorry when you go. When you first came to
take care of me at the Carnival I thought it was wonder-
ful; you came and went away again so fast. And Naldo
said perhaps you were a saint, and that made me tremble
a little, though the saints are very good, I know; and you
were good to me; and now you have taken care of Lillo.
Perhaps you will always come and take care of me. That
was how Naldo did a long while ago; he came and took
care of me when I was frightened, one San Giovanni. I
couldn't think where he came from — he was so beautiful
and good. And so are you," ended Tessa, looking up at
Eomola witli devout admiration.

" Naldo is your husband. His eyes are like Lillo's,"
said Eomola, looking at the boy's darklj^-iienciled eye-
brows, unusual at his age. She did not speak interrog-

THE OTHER WIFE. 437

atively, but with a quiet certainty of inference whicli was
necessarily mysterious to Tessa.

''Ah! you know him!" she said, pausing a little in
wonder. " Perhaj^s you know Xofri and Peretola, and our
house on the hill, and everything. Yes, like Lillo's; but

not his hair. His hair is dark and long " she went on,

getting rather excited. '•' Ah! if you know it, ecco! "

She had put her hand to a thin red silk cord that hung
round her neck, and drew from her bosom the tiny old
parchment Breve, the horn of red coral, and a long 'dark
curl carefully tied at one end and suspended with those
mystic treasures. She held them toward Eomola, away
from Xinna's snatching hand.

'' It is a fresh one. I cut it lately. See how bright it
is!'' she said, laying it against the white background of
Romola's fingers. " They get dim, and then he lets me
cut another when his hair is grown; and I put it with the
Breve, because sometimes he is away a long while, and
then I think it helps to take care of me.''

A slight shiver passed through Eomola as the curl Avas
laid across her fingers. At Tessa's first mention of her
husband as having come mysteriously she knew not whence
a possibility had risen before Eomola that made her heart
beat faster; for to one who is anxiously in search of a
certain object the faintest suggestions have a peculiar
significance. And when the curl was held toward her, it
seemed for an instant like a mocking phantasm of the
lock she herself had cut to wind with one of her own five
years ago. But she preserved her outward calmness, bent
not only on knowing the truth, but also on coming to that
knowledge in a way that would not pain this poor, trust-
ing, ignorant thing, with the child's mind in the woman's
body. "Foolish and helpless": yes; so far she corre-
sponded to Baldassarre's account.

"It is a beautiful curl," she said, resisting the impulse
to withdraw her hand. "Lillo's curls will be like it,
perhaps, for his cheek, too, is dark. And you never
know where your husband goes to when he leaves you?"

"Xo," said Tessa, jDutting back her treasures out of the
children's way. "But I know ^lesser San Michele takes
care of him, for he gave him a beautiful coat, all made of
little chains; and if he puts that on, nobody can kill him.

And perhaps, if " Tessa hesitated a little, under a

recurrence of that original dreamy wonder about Eomola
which had been expelled by chatting contact — "if you

438 ROMOLA.

'Were a saint, you would take care of him, too, because you
have taken care of me and Lillo."

An agitated flusli came over Romola's face in the first
moment of certainty, but she had bent lier cheek against
Lillo's head. Tlie feeling that leaped out in that flush
was something like exultation at the thought that the
wife's burden might be about to slip from her overladen
slioulders; that this little ignorant creature might prove
to be Tito's lawful wife. A strange exultation for a proud
and high-born woman to have been brought to I But it
seemed to Romola as if that were the only issue that
would make duty anything else for her than an insoluble
problem. Yet she was not deaf to Tessa's last appealing
words; she raised her head, and said, in her clearest
tones —

''I will always take care of you if I see you need me.
But that beautiful coat? your husband did not Avear it
when you were first married? Perhaps he used not to be
so long away from you then?"

"Ah, yes! he was. Much — much longer. So long, I
thought he would never come back. I used to cry. Oh,
me! I was beaten then; a long, long while ago at Per-
etola, where we had the goats and mules."

"And how long had you been married before your
husband had that chain coat?" said Romola, her heart
beating faster and faster.

Tessa looked meditative, and began to count on her
fingers, and Eomola watched the fingers as if they would
tell the secret of her destiny.

"The chestnuts were ripe when we were married," said
Tessa, marking off her thumb and fingers again as she
spoke; "and then again they were ripe at Peretola before
he came back, and then again, after that, on the hill.
And soon the soldiers came, and we heard the trumpets,
and then Naldo had the coat."

"You had been married more than two years. In which
church were you married?" said Eomola, too entirely
absorbed by one thought to put any question that was less
direct. Perhaps before the next morning she might go to
her godfather and say that she was not Tito Melema's law-
ful wife — that the vows which had bound her to strive after
an impossible union had been made void beforehand.

Tessa gave a slight start at Romola's new tone of inquiry,
and looked up at her with a hesitating cxi)ression. Hith-
erto she had prattled on without consciousness that she

THE OTHEE WIFE. 439

was making revelations, any more than when she said old
things over and over again to Monna Lisa.

"Xaldo said I M'as never to tell about that/' she said,
doiibtfully -Do you think he would not be angry if I
told you ? ° -^

,, '/^^,f ^'^S'^^^ *l^at you should tell me. Tell me every-
thing said Eomola, looking at her with mild authority
It the impression from Naldo's command had been much
more recent than it was, the constraining effect of Eomola's
mysterious authority would have overcome it. But the
sense that she was telling what she had never told before
made her begin with a lowered voice.

''It was not in a church — it was at the Xativita, when
there was a fair, and all the i^eople went overnight to see
the Madonna in the Xunziata, and my mother was ill and
couldn't go, and I took the bunch of cocoons for her; and
then he came to me in the church and I heard him say,
'Tessa!' I knew him because he liad taken care of me at
the San Giovanni, and then we went into the piazza where
the fair was, and I had some herlingozzi, for I was hungry
and he was very good to me; and at the end of the piazza
there was a holy father, and an altar like what they have
at the processions outside the churches. So he married us,
and then ]V"altlo took me back into the church and left me;
and I went home, and my mother died, and Nofri began
to beat me more, and Xaldo never came back. And I used
to cry, and once at the Carnival I saw him and followed
him, and he was angry, and said he would come some time,
I must wait. So I went and waited; but, oh! it was a long
while before he came; but he would have come if he could,
for he was good; and then he took me away, because I
cried and said I could not bear to stay with JSTofri. And,
oh! I was so glad, and since then I have been alwavs happy,'
for I don't mind about the goats and mules, because I have
Lillo and Ninna now; and Xaldo is never angry, only I
think he doesn't love Ninna so well as Lillo, and she is
pretty."

Quite forgetting that she had thought her speech rather
momentous at the beginning, Tessa fell to devouring Ninna
with kisses, while Eomola sat in silence with absent eyes.
It was inevitable that in this moment she should think of
the three beings before her chiefly in their relation to her
own lot. and she was feeling the" chill of disappointment
that her difRculties were not to be solved bv external law.
She had relaxed her hold of Lillo, and was leaning her

440 BOMOLA.

clieek against her hand, seeing nothing of the scene around
her. Lillo was quick in perceiving a change that was not
agreeable to him: he had not yet made any return to her
caresses, but he objected to their withdrawal, and jDutting
up both his brown arms to pull her head toward him, he
said, " Play with me again!"

Eomola, roused from her self-absorption, clasped the
lad anew, and looked from him to Tessa, who had now
paused from her shower of kisses, and seemed to have
returned to the more placid delight of contemplating the
heavenly lady's face. That face w^as undergoing a subtle
change, like the gradual oncoming of a warmer, softer
light. Presently Romola took her scissors from her scar-
sella, and cut off one of her long, wavy locks, while the
three pair of wide eyes followed her movements with
kitten-like observation.

"I must go away from you now," she said, *'but I Avill
leave this lock of hair that it may remind you of me,
because if you are ever in trouble you can think that per-
haps God will send me to take care of you again. I cannot
tell you Avhere to find me, but if I ever know that you
want me I will come to you. Addiol"

She had set down Lillo hurriedly, and held out her hand
to Tessa, who kissed it with a mixture of awe and sorrow
at this jiarting. Romola's mind was oppressed Avith
thoughts; she needed to be alone as soon as possible,
but with her habitual care for the least fortunate, she
turned aside to put her hand in a friendly Avay on Monna
Lisa's shoulder and make her a farewell sign. Before the
old woman had finished her deep reverence, Romola had
disappeared.

Monna Lisa and Tessa moved toward each other by
simultaneous impulses, while the two children stood cling-
ing to their mother's skirts as if they, too, felt the atmos-
phere of awe.

"Do you think she loas a saint?" said Tessa, in Lisa's
ear, showing her the lock.

Lisa rejected that notion very decidedly by a backward
movement of her fingers, and then stroking the rippled
gold, said —

" She's a great and noble lady. I saw such in my
youth."

Romola went home and sat alone through the sultry
hours of that day with the heavy certainty that her lot
was unchanged. She was thrown back again on the con-

THE OTHER WIFE. 441

flict between the demands of an outward law, which she
recognized as a widely ramifying obligation, and the
demands of inner moral facts which were becoming more
and more peremptory. She had drunk in deeply the
spirit of that teaching by which Savonarola had urged her
to return to her place. She felt that the sanctity attached
to all close relations, and, therefore, pre-eminently to the
closest, was but the expression in outward law of that
result toward which all human goodness and nobleness
must spontaneously tend; that the light abandonment of
ties, whether inherited or voluntary, because they had
ceased to be pleasant, was the uprooting of social and per-
sonal virtue. What else had Tito's crime toward Baldas-
sarre been but that abandonment working itself out to the
most hideous extreme of falsity and ingratitude?

And the inspiring consciousness breathed into her hj
Savonarola's influence that her lot was vitally united with
the general lot had exalted even the minor details of obli-
gation into religion. She felt that she was marching with
a great army; she was feeling the stress of a common life.
If victims were needed, and it was uncertain on whom the
lot might fall, she would stand ready to answer to her
uame. She had stood long; she had striven hard to fulfill
the bond, but she had seen all the conditions which made
the fulfillment possible gradually forsaking her. The one
effect of her marriage tie seemed to be the stifling pre-
dominance over her of a nature that she despised. All her
efforts at union had only made its impossibility more pal-
pable, and the relation had become for her simply a
degrading servitude. The law was sacred. Yes, but
rebellion might be sacred too. It flashed upon her mind
that the problem before her was essentially the same as
that which had lain before Savonarola— the problem where
the sacredness of obedience ended, and where the sacred-
ness of rebellion began. To her, as to him, there had
come one of those moments in life when the soul must
dare to act on its own warrant, not only without external
law to appeal to, but in the face of a law which is not
unarmed with Divine lightnings— lightnings that may yet
fall if the warrant has been false.

Before the sun had gone down she had adopted a resolve.
She would ask no counsel of her godfather or of Savona-
rola until she had made one determined effort to speak
freely with Tito and obtain his consent that she should
live apart from him. She desired not to leave him clan-

442 ROMOLA.

destinely again, or to forsake Florence. She would tell
him that if he ever felt a real need of her, she would come
back to him. Was not that the utmost faithfulness to her
bond that could be required of her? A shuddering antici-
pation came over her that he would clothe a refusal in a
sneering suggestion that she should enter a convent as the
only mode of quitting him that would not be scandalous.
He knew well that her mind revolted from that means of
escape, not only because of her own repugnance to a narrow
rule, but because all the cherished memories of her father
forbade that she should adopt a mode of life which was
associated with his deepest griefs and his bitterest dislike.

Tito had announced his intention of coming home this
evening. She would wait for him, and say what she had
to say at once, for it was difficult to get his ear during the
day. If he had the slightest suspicion that personal words
were coming, he slipped away with an appearance of unpre-
meditated ease. When she sent for Maso to tell him that
she would wait for his master, she observed that the old
man looked at her and lingei'ed with a mixture of hesi-
tation and wondering anxiety; but, finding that she asked
him no question, he slowly turned away. Why should she
ask questions? Perhaps jVfaso only knew or guessed some-
thing of what she knew already.

It was late before Tito came. Romola had been pacing
up and down the long room which had once been the
library, with the windows open, and a loose white linen
robe on instead of her usual black garment. She was glad
of that change after the long hours of heat and motionless
meditation; but the coolness and exercise made her more
intensely wakeful, and as she went with the lamp in her
hand to open the door for Tito, he might well have been
startled by the vividness of her eyes and the exjiression of
painful resolution, which was in contrast with her usual
self-restrained quiescence before him. But it seemed that
this excitement Avas just what he expected.

"^ Ah! it is you, Eomola. Maso is gone to bed," he said,
in a grave, quiet tone, interposing to close the door for
her. Then, turning round, he said, looking at her more
fully than he was Avont, ''you have heard it all, I see."

Romola quivered. He then was inclined to take the
initiative. He had been to Tessa. She led the way through
the nearest door, set down her lamp, and turned toward
him again.

*' You must not think despairingly of the consequences,"

WHY TITO WAS SAFE. 443

said Tito, in a tone of soothing encounigenient. at uliieh
Romola stood wondering, until he added, " The accused
have too many family ties with idl parties not to escape;
and Messer Bernardo del Xeru has other tilings in his
favor besides his age.''

Romohi started, and gave a cry as if she had been
suddenly stricken by a sharp weapon.

*MVhat! you did not know it? "said Tito, putting his
hand under her arm that lie might lead her to a seat; but
she seemed to be unaware of his touch.

" Tell me," she said, hastily—" tell me what it is."

"A man, whose name you"' may forget — Lamberto dell
Antella — who was banished, has been seized within the
territory: a letter has been found on him of very dangerous
import to the chief Mcdiceans, and the scoundi'el, who was
once a favorite hound of Piero de Medici, is ready now to
swear what any one pleases against him or his friends.
Some have made their escape, but five are now in prison."

''My godfather?" said Eomola, scarcely above a whisper,
as Tito made a slight pause.

"Yes; I grieve to say it. But along with him there
are three, at least, whose names have a commanding
interest even among the popular party — Xiccold Ridolfi,
Lorenzo Tornabuoni, and Giannozzo Pucci."

The tide of Romola's feelings had been violently turned
into a new channel. .In the tumult of that moment there
could be no check to the words which came as the impul-
sive utterance of her long-accumulating horror. When
Tito had named the men of whom she felt certain he was
the confederate, she said, with a recoiling gesture and low-
toned bitterness —

' ' And yo u — you are safe ? "

" You are certainly an amiable wife, my Romola," said
Tito, with the coldest irony. "Yes; I am safe."

They turned away from each other in silence.

CHAPTER LVII.

WHY TITO WAS SAFE.

Tito had good reasons for saying that he Avas safe. In

the last three months, during which he had foreseen the
discovery of the Medicean conspirators as a probable event,

444 HOMOLA.

he had had plenty of time to provide himself with resources.
He had been strengthening his influence at Rome and at
Milan, by being the medium of secret information and
indirect measures against the Frate and the popular party;
he had cultivated more assiduously than ever the regard of
this party, by showing subtle evidence that his j^olitieal
convictions were entirely on their side; and all the while,
instead of withdrawing his agency from the Mediceans,
he had sought to be moi-e actively employed and exclusively
trusted by tliem. It was easy to him to keej) up this triple
game. The principle of duplicity admitted by the Medi-
ceans on their own behalf deprived them of any standard
by which they could measure the trustworthiness of a
colleague who had not, like themselves, hereditary inter-
ests, alliances, and prejudices, which were intensely
Medicean. In their minds, to deceive the opposite party
was fair stratagem ; to deceive their own party was a base-
ness to which they felt no temptation; and, in using Tito's
facile ability, they were not keenly awake to the fact that
the absence of traditional attachments which made him a
convenient agent was also the absence of what among
themselves was the chief guarantee of mutual honor.
Again, the Eoman and Milanese friends of the aristocratic
party, or Arrabbiati, who were the bitterest enemies of
Savonarola, carried on a system of underhand correspond-
ence and espionage, in which the deepest hypocrisy was
the best service, and demanded the heaviest pay; so that
to suspect an agent because he played a part strongly
would have been an absurd want of logic. On the oclier
hand, the Piagnoni of the popular party, who had the
directness that belongs to energetic conviction, were the
more inclined to credit Tito with sincerity in his political
adhesion to them, because he affected no religious sym-
pathies.

By virtue of these conditions, the last three months had
been a time of flattering success to Tito. The result he
most cared for was the securing of a future position for
himself at Eome or at Milan; for he had a growing determi-
nation, when the favorable moment should come, to quit
Florence for one of those great capitals where life was
easier, and the rewards of talent and learning were more
splendid. At present, the scale dipped in favor of ]\[ilan;
and if wiiliin tlie year he could render certain services to
Duke Ludovico Sforza, he liad the prospect of a place at the
Milanese court which outweighed the advantages of Rome.

WHY TITO WAS SAFE, 445

The revelation of the Medicean conspiracy, then, had
been a subject of forethought to Tito: but he had not been
able to foresee the mode in which it would be brought
about. The arrest of Lamberto dell Antella with a tell-
tale letter on his person, and a bitter rancor against the
Medici m his heart, was an incalculable event. It was not
possible, in spite of the careful pretexts with which his
agency had been guarded, that Tito should esca])e implica-
tion: he had never expected this in case of any wide dis-
covery concerning the Medicean plots. But his quick
mmd had soon traced out the course that would secure his
own safety with the fewest unpleasant concomitants. It is
agreeable to keep a whole skin; but the skin still remains
an organ sensitive to the atmosphere.

His reckoning had not deceived him. That night,
before he returned home, he had secured the three results
for which he most cared: he was to be freed from all pro-
ceedings against him on account of complicity with the
Mediceans; he was to retain his secretaryship for another
year, unless he previously resigned it; and, lastly, the price
by which he had obtained these guarantees was to be kept as
a State secret. The price would have been thought heavy
by most men; and Tito himself would rather not have
paid it.

He had applied himself first to win the mind of Fran-
cesco Valori, who was not only one of the Ten under whom
he immediately held his secretaiyship, but one of the spe-
cial council appointed to investigate the evidence of the
plot. Francesco Valori, as we have seen, was the head of
the Piaguoni, a man with certain fine qualities that were
not incompatible with violent partisanship, with an arro-
gant temper that alienated his friends, nor with bitter per-
soiLal animosities — one of the bitterest being directed
against Bernardo del Nero. To him, in a brief private
interview, after obtaining a pledge of secrecy, Tito avowed
his own agency for the Mediceans — an agency induced by
motives about which he was very frank, declaring at the
same time that he had always believed their efforts futile,
and that he sincerely preferred the maintenance of the
popular government; affected to confide to Valori, as a
secret, his own personal dislike for Bernardo del Nero;
and, after this preparation, came to the important state-
ment that tlicre was another Medicean plot, of which, if
he obtained certain conditions from tlie government, he
could, by a journey to Siena and into Romagna, where

4:4:6 ROMOLA.

Piero de Medici was again trying to gather forces, obtain
documentary evidence to lay before the council. To this
end it was essential that his character as a Medicean agent
should be unshaken for all Mediceans, and hence the fact
that he had been a source of information to the authori-
ties must be wrapped in profound secrecy. Still, some odor
of the facts might escape in spite of precaution, and be-
fore Tito could incur the unpleasant consequences of act-
ing against his friends, he must be assured of immunity
from any prosecution as a Medicean, and from deprivation
of ofhce for a year to come.

These propositions did not sound in the ear of Francesco
Valori precisely as they sound to us. Valori's mind vvas
not intensely bent on the estimation of Tito's conduct;
and it tvas intensely bent on procuring an extreme sentence
against the five prisoners. There were sure to be immense
efforts to save them; and it was to be wished (on public
grounds) that the evidence against them should be of the
strongest, so as to alarm all well-affected men at the
dangers of clemency. The character of legal proceedings
at that time imjDlied that evidence was one of those desir-
able things which could only be come at by foul means.
To catch a few people and torture them into confessing
everybody's guilt was one step toward justice; and it was
not always easy to see the next, unless a traitor turned up.
Lamberto dell Antella had been tortured in aid of his pre-
vious willingness to tell more than he knew; nevertheless,
additional and stronger facts were desirable, especially
against Bernardo del Nero, who, so far as appeared hith-
erto, had simply refrained from betraying the late plot
after having tried in vain to discourage it; for the welfare
of Florence demanded that the guilt of Bernardo del Nero
should be put in the strongest light. So Francesco Valori
zealously believed; and perhaps he was not himself aware
that the strength of his zeal was determined by his hatred.
lie decided that Tito's proposition ought to be accepted,
laid it before his colleagues without disclosing Tito's name,
and won them over to his opinion. Late in the day, Tito
was admitted to an audience of the Special Council, and
produced a deep sensation among them by revealing another
plot for insuring the mastery of Florence to Piero de Med-
ici, which was to have been carried into execution in the
middle of this very month of Augiist. Documentary evi-
dence on this subject would do more tlian anything else to
make the right course clear. He received a commission to

WHY TITO U'AS SAFE. 447

start for Siena by break of day; and, besides this, he carried
away witli hini from the council chamber a written guaran-
tee of his immunity and his retention of office.

Among the twenty Florentines who bent their grave
eyes on Tito, as he stood gracefully before them, speaking
of startlmg things witli easy periphrasis, and with that
apparently unaffected admission of being actuated by
motives short of the highest, which is often the intensest
affectation, there were several whose minds were not too
entirely preoccupied to pass a new judgment on him
in these new circumstances; they silently concluded that
this ingenious and serviceable Greek was in future rather
to be used for public needs than for private intimacy.
Unprincipled men were useful, enabling those who had
more scruples to keep tlieir hands tolerably clean in
a world where there was much dirty work to be done.
Indeed, it was not clear to respectable Florentine brains,
unless they held the Frate's extravagant belief in a possi-
ble purity and loftiness to be striven for on this earth, how
life was to be carried on in any department without human
instruments whom it Avould not be unbecoming to kick or
to spit upon in the act of handing them their wages.
Some of these very men who passed a tacit Judgment on
Tito were shortly to be engaged in a memorable transaction
that could by no means have been carried through with-
out the use of an unscrnpulousness as decided as his;
but, as their own bright poet Pulci had said for them, it is
one thing to love the fruits of treachery, and another thing
to love traitors —

" n tradimento a molti place assai,
Ma il traditore a gnun non piacque mai."

The same society has had a gibbet for the murderer and a
gibbet for the martyr, an execrating hiss for a dastardly act,
and as loud a hiss for many a word of generous truthful-
ness or just insight: a mixed condition of things Avhich is
the sign, not of hopeless confusion, but of struggling order.
For Tito himself, he was not unaware that he had sunk
a little in the estimate of the men who had accepted his
services. He had that degree of self-contemplation which
necessarily accompanies the habit of acting on well-con-
sidered reasons, of whatever quality; and if he could have
chosen, he would have declined to see himself disapproved
by men of the M'orld. He had never meant to be dis-
approved; he had meant always to conduct himself so ably

448 ROMOLA.

that if he acted in opposition to the standard of other men
they should not be aware of it; and tlie barrier between
himself and Roniola had been raised by the impossibility
of such concealment with her. He shrank from con-
demnatory judgments as from a climate to which he could
not adapt himself. But things were not so plastic in the
hands of cleverness as could be wished, and events had
turned out inconveniently. He had really no rancor against
Messer Bernardo del Nero; he had a personal liking for
Lorenzo Tornabuoni and Giannozzo Pucci. He had served
them very ably, and in such a way that if their party had
been winners he would have merited high reward; but was
he to relinquish all the agreeable fruits of life because
their party had failed? His proffer of a little additional
proof against them would probably have no influence on
their fate; in fact, he felt convinced that they would
escape any extreme consequences; but if he had not given
it, his own fortunes, which made a promising fabric, would
have been utterly ruined. And what motive could any
man really have, except his own interest? Frorentines
whose passions were engaged in their petty and precarious
political schemes might have no self-interest separable
from family pride and tenacity in old hatreds and attach-
ments; a modern simpleton who swallowed whole one of
the old systems of philosophy, and took the indigestion it
occasioned for the signs of a divine afflux or the voice of
an inward monitor, might see his interest in a form of self-
conceit which he called self-rewarding virtue; fanatics
who believed in the coming Scourge and Renovation might
see their own interest in a future palm-branch and wdiite
robe: but no man of clear intellect allowed his course to be
determined by such puerile impulses or questionable inward
fumes. Did not Pontanus, poet and philosopher of unri-
valed Latinity, make the finest possible oration at Naples to
welcome the French king, who had come to dethrone the
learned orator's roj'al friend and ]iatron? and still Pontanus
held up his head and prospered. Men did not really care
about these things, except when their personal spleen was
touched. It was w^eakness only that was despised ; powder of
any sort carried its immunity; and no man, unless by very
rare good fortune, could mount high in the world without
incurring a few unpleasant necessities which laid him open
to enmity, and perhaps to a little hissing, when enmity
wanted a pretext.

It was a faint prognostic of that hissing, gathered by

A FINAL UNDERSTANDING. 449

Tito from certain indications when he was before the
council which gave his present conduct the character of
an epoch to him, and made him dwell on it with argumenta-
tive vindication. It was not that he was taking a deeper
step m wrong-doing, for it was not possible that he should
feel any tie to the Mediceans to be stronger than the tie to
his father; but his conduct to his father had been hidden
by successful lying: his present act did not admit of total
concealment— m its very nature it was a revelation. And
Tito winced under his new liability to disesteem.

Weill a little patience, and in another vear, or perhaps
m half a year, he might turn his back "on these hard
eager Florentines, with their futile quarrels and sinking
fortunes. His brilliant success at Florence had had
some ugly flaws in it: he had fallen in love with the wrong
woman, and Baldassarre had come back under incalculable
circumstances. But as Tito galloped with a loose rein
toward Siena, he saw a future before him in which he
would no longer be haunted by those mistakes. He had
much money safe out of Florence already; he was in the
fresh ripeness of eight-and-twentv; he was conscious of
well-tried skill. Could he not strip himself of the past,
as of rehearsal clothing, and throw away the old bundle,
to robe himself for the real scene?

It did not enter into Tito's meditations on the future,
that, on issuing from the council chamber and descending
the stairs, he had brushed against a man whose face he had
not stayed to recognize in the lamplight. The man was
Ser Ceccone— also willing to serve the State by giving
information against unsuccessful employers.

CHAPTEE LYIII.

A FINAL UNDERSTANDING.

Tito soon returned from Siena, but almost immediately
set out on another journey, from which he did not return
till the seventeenth of August. Xearly a fortnight had
passed since the arrest of the accused, and still they were
in prison, still their fate was uncertain. Eomola had felt
during this interval as if all cares were suspended for her.

'450 ROMOLA.

other than watching the fluctuating probabilities concern-
ing that fate. Sometimes they seemed strongly in favor
of the prisoners; for the chances of effective interest on
their behalf were heightened by delay, and an indefinite
prospect of delay was opened by the reluctance of all
persons in authority to incur the odium attendant on any
decision. On the one side there was a loud cry that the
Republic was in danger, and that lenity to the prisoners
would be the signal of attack for all its enemies; on the
other, there was a certainty that a sentence of death and
confiscation of property passed on five citizens of distin-
guished name, would entail the rancorous hatred of their
relatives on all who were conspicuously instrumental to
such a sentence.

The final judgment properly lay with the Eight, who
presided over the administration of criminal justice; and
the sentence depended on a majority of six votes. But
the Eight shrank from their onerous responsibility, and
asked in this exceptional case to have it shared by the
Signoria (or the Gonfaloniere and the eight Priors). The
Signoria m its turn shrugged its shoulders, and proposed
the appeal to the Great Council. For, according to a law
passed by the earnest persuasion of Savonarola nearly
three years before, whenever a citizen was condemned to
death by the fatal six votes (called the set fare or six
beans, beans being in more senses than one the political
pulse of Florence), he liad the right of appealing from
that sentence to the Great Council.

But in this stage of the business, the friends of the
accused resisted the appeal, determined chiefly by the
wish to gain delay; and, in fact, strict legality required
that sentence should have been passed prior to the appeal.
Their resistance prevailed, and a middle course was taken;
the sentence was referred to a large assembly convened on
the seventeenth, consisting of all the higher magistracies,
the smaller council or Senate of Eighty, and a select
number of citizens.

On this day Eomola, with anxiety heightened by the
possibility that before its close her godfather's fate might
be decided, had obtained leave to see him for the second
time, but only in the presence of witnesses. She had
returned to the Via de Bardi in company with her cousin
Brigida, still ignorant whether the council had come to
any decisive issue; and Monna Brigida had gone out again
to await the momentous! news fit the house of a friend

A FINAL UNDERSTANDING. 451

belonging to one of the magistracies, that she might bring
back authentic tidings as soon as they were to be had.

Romola had sunk on the first seat in the bright saloon,
too much agitated, too sick at heart, to care about her
place, or be conscious of discordance in the objects that
surrounded her. She sat with her back to the door,
resting her head on her hands. It seemed a long while
since Monna Brigida had gone, and Romola was expecting
her return. But when the door opened she knew it was
not Monna Brigida who entered.

Since she had parted from Tito on that memorable
night, she had had no external proof to warrant her belief
that he had won his safety by treachery; on the contrary,
she had had evidence that he was still trusted by the
Mediceans, and was believed by them to be accomplish-
ing certain errands of theirs in Romagna, under cover
of fulfilling a commission of the government. For the
obscurity in which the evidence concerning the conspira-
tors was shrouded allowed it to be understood that Tito
had escaped any implication.

But Romola's suspicion was not to be dissipated; her
horror of his conduct toward Baldassarre projected itself
over every conception of his acts ; it was as if she had
seen him committing a murder, and had had a diseased
impression ever after that his hands were covered with
fresh blood.

As she heard his step on th£ stone floor, a chill shudder
passed through her; she could not turn round, she could
not rise to give any greeting. He did not speak, but after
an instant's pause took a seat on the other side of the
table just opposite to her. Then she raised her eyes and
looked at him; but she was mute. He did not show any
irritation, but said, coolly —

" This meeting corresponds with our parting, Romola.
But I understand that it is a moment of terrible suspense.
I am come, however, if you will listen to me, to bring you
the relief of hope."

She started, and altered her position, but looked at him
dubiously.

"It will not be unwelcome to you to hear — even
though it is I who tell it — that the council is prorogued
till the tVenty-first. The Eight have been frightened at
last into passing a sentence of condemnation, but the
demand has now been made on behalf of the condemned
for the x\ppeal to the Great Council."

452 ROMOLA.

Romola's face lost its dubious expression ; she asked
eagerly —

"And when is it to be made?"

"It has not yet been granted; but it may he granted.
The Special Council is to meet again on the twenty-first
to deliberate whether the Appeal shall be allowed or not.
In the meantime there is an interval of three days, in
which cbances may occur in favor of the prisoners — in
which interest may be used on their behalf."

Eomola started from her seat. The color had risen
to her face like a visible thought, and her hands trembled.
In that moment her feeling toward Tito was forgotten.

" Possibly," said Tito, also rising, " your own intention
may have anticipated what I was going to say. You are
thinking of the Frate."

"I am," said Eomola, looking at him with surprise.
"Has he done anything? Is there anything to tell me?"

" Only this. It was Messer Francesco Valerias bitter-
ness and violence which chiefly determined the course of
things in the council to-day. Half the men who gave in
their opinion against the prisoners were frightened into it,
and there are numerous friends of Fra Girolamo both in
this Special Council and out of it who are strongly opi)Osed
to the sentence of death — Piero Guicciardini, for example,
who is one member of the Signoria that made the stoutest
resistance; and there is Giovan Battista Ridolfi, who,
Piagnone as he is, will not Rightly forgive the death of his
brother Niccolo."

"But how can the appeal be denied," said Romola,
indignantly, " when it is the law — when it was one of the
chief glories of the popular government to have passed the
law?"

" They call this an exceptional case. Of course there are
ingenious arguments, but there is much more of loud bluster
about the danger of the Republic. But, you see, no oppo-
sition could prevent the assembly from being prorogued,
and a certain powerful influence rightly applied during the
next three days might determine the wavering courage of
those who desire that the Appeal should be granted, and
might even give a check to the headlong enmity of Fran-
cesco Valori. It happens to have come to my knowledge
that the Frate has so far interfered as to send a message
to him in favor of Lorenzo Tornabuoni. I know you can
sometimes have access to the Frate: it might at all events
be worth while to use your privilege now."

A FINAL rXDERSTAXDIXG. 453

" It is true/'-' said Roxnola, witli an air of abstraction.
" I cannot believe that the Frate would approve denying
the Appeal."

" I heard it said by more than one person in the court
of the Palazzo, before I came away, that it would be to the
everlasting discredit of Fra Girolamo if he allowed a
government which is almost entirely made up of his
])arty, to deny the Appeal, without entering his protest,
when he has been boasting in his books and sermons
that it was he who got the law passed.* But between
ourselves, with all respect for your Frate's ability, my
Komola, he has got into the practice of preaching that
form of human sacrifices called killing tyrants and wicked
malcontents, which some of his followers are likely to
think inconsistent with lenity in the present case."

•' I know, I know," said Romola, with a look and tone
of pain. ''But he is driven into those excesses of speech.
It used to be different. I will ask for an interview. I
cannot rest without it. I trust in the greatness of his
heart."

She was not looking at Tito; her eyes were bent with a
vague gaze toward the ground, and she had no distinct
consciousness that the words she heard came from her
husband.

" Better lose no time, then," said Tito, with unmixed
suavity, moving his cap i'ound in his hands as if he were
about to put it on and depa|^. "And now, Romola, you
will perhaps be able to see, in spite of prejudice, that my
wishes go with yours in this matter. You will not regard
the misfortune of my safety as an offense."

Something like an electric shock jiassed through Romola:
it was the full consciousness of her husband's presence
returning to her. She looked at him witliout speaking.

'^At least," he added, in a slightly harder tone, "'you
will endeavor to base our intercourse on some other reason-
ings than that because an evil deed is possible, / have done
it. Am I alone to be beyond the pale of your extensive
charity?"

* The most recent, and in some respects the best, biographer of Savo-
narola. Signor Villari, endeavoi-s to show that the Law of Appeal ultimately
enacted, being wider than the law oriarinally contemplated by Savonarola,
was a source of bitter annoyance to him, as a contrivance of the aristoci'atic
party for attaching to the measures of the popular government the injuri-
ous results of license. But in taking this \dew the estimable biogi-apher
lost sight of the fact that, not only in his sermons, but in a deliberately pre-
pai'cdliDok (t)ie ComprjuJiuin Rrvrlatinniuio, vrritton long after the Appeal
had Ik; line livr, S ivoiiarola euuirteratcs among the bcnetits seciu'ed to
i lorcaui', '" the AiJi^r^xi from the Six VuUs, advocated hy mc, for the (/rmtcr
Sfccurity of the citiat/w."

454 ROMOLA.

The feeling which hud been driven back from Komola's
lips a fortnight before rose again with the gathered force
of a tidal wave. She spoke with a decision which told
him that she was careless of consequences.

''It is too late^ Tito. There is no kjlling the suspicion
chat deceit lias once begotten. And now I knoAV every-
thing. I know who that old man was: he was your father,
to whom you owe everything — to whom you owe more than
if you had been his own child. By the side of that, it is
a small thing that you broke my trust and my father's.
As long as you deny the truth about that old man, there
is a horror rising between us: the law that should make
us one can never be obeyed. T too am a human being. I
have a soul of my own that abhors 3'our actions. Our
union is a pretense — as if a perpetual lie could be a sacred
marriage."

Tito did not answer immediately. When he did speak
it was with a calculated caution, that was stimulated by
alarm.

"^ And you mean to carry out that independence by quit-
ting me, I presume? "

"1 desire to quit you," said Eomola, impetuously.

" And supposing I do not submit to part with what the
law gives me some security for retaining? You will then,
of course, proclaim your reasons in the ear of all Florence.
You will bring forward your mad assassin, who is doubt-
less ready to obey your call, ai|d you will tell the world that
you believe his testimony because he is so rational as to
desire to assassinate me. You will first inform the Sig-
noria that I am a Mediccan conspirator, and then you will
inform the Medieeans that I have betrayed them, and in
both cases you will offer the excellent proof that you
believe me capable in general of everything bad. It -will-
certainly be a striking position for a wife to adopt. And
if, on such evidence, you succeed in holding me up to
infamy, you will have surpassed all the heroines of the
Greek drama."

He paused a moment, but she stood mute. He went on
with the sense of mastery.

"I believe you have no other grievance against me —
except that I have failed in fulfilling some lofty indefinite
conditions on which you gave me your wifely affection,
so tliat, ]jy withdrawing it, you have graduall}' reduced me
to the careful supply of your wants as a fair Piagnone of
high condition and "liberal charities. " think your success

PLEADIXG. 455

in gibbeting me is not certain. But doubtless you would
begin by winning the ear of Messer Bernardo del Nero^"

"Why. do I speak of anythins:?'^ cried Eomola, in
anguish, sinking on her chair again, '^t is hateful in
me to be thinking of myself,"

She did not notice when Tito left the room, or know
how long it was before the door opened to admit Monna
Brigida. But m that instant she started up and said —

'• Cousin, we must go to San Marco directly. I must
see my confessor, Fra Salvestro."

CHAPTER LIX.

PLEADIJTG.

The morning was in its early k-ightness when Eomola
was again on her way to San Marco, having obtained
through Fra Salvestro, the evening before, the promise of
an interview with Fra Girolamo in the chapter-house of
the convent. The rigidity with which Savonarola guarded
his life from all the pretexts of calumny made such inter-
views very rare, and whenever they were granted, they
were kept free from any appearance of mystery. For this
reason the hour chosen was one at which there were likely
to be other visitors in the outer cloisters of San Marco.

She chose to pass through the heart of the city that she
might notice the signs of public feeling. Every loggia, every
convenient corner of the piazza, every shop that made a ren-
dezvous for gossips, was astir with the excitement of gratu-
itous debate; a languishing trade tending to make political
discussion all the more vigorous. It was clear that the
parties for and against the "death of the conspirators were
bent on making the fullest use of the three days' interval in
order to determine the popular mood. Already handbills
were in_ circulation; some presenting, in large print, the
alternative of justice on the conspirators or ruin to the
Republic; others in equally large print urging the observ-
ance of the law and the granting of the Appeal. Round
these Jutting islets of black capitals there were lakes of
smaller characters setting forth arguments less necessary
to be read: for it was an opinion entertained at that time
^in the first flush of triumph at the discovery of printing),

456 KOMOLA.

that there was no argument more widely-convincing than
questiou-begging phrases in large type.

Romola, however, cared especially to become acquainted
with the arguments in smaller tyj)e, and, though obliged
to hasten forward, she looked round anxiously as she went
that she might miss no opportunity of securing copies.
For a long way she saw none but such as were in the
hands of eager readers, or else fixed on the walls, from
which in some places the sbirri Avere tearing them down.
But at last, passing behind San Giovanni with a quickened
pace that she might avoid the many acquaintances who
frequented the piazza, she saw Bratti with a stock of hand-
bills which he appeared to be exchanging for small coin
with the passers-by. She was too familiar with the humble
life of Florence for Bratti to be any stranger to her, and
turning toward him she said, "Have you two sorts of
handbills, Bratti? Let me have them quickly."

" Two sorts," said Bratti, separating the wet sheets with
a slowness that tried Romola^s patience. " There's ' Law,'
and there's 'Justice.'"

''Which sort do you sell most of?"

"'Justice' — 'Justice' goes the quickest — so I raised
the price, and made it two da]iaTi. But then I bethought
me the ' Law ' was good Avare, too, and had as good a right
to be charged for as 'Justice'; for people set no store by
cheap things, and if I sold the ' Law ' at one danaro, I
should be doing it a wrong. And I'm a fair trader. ' Law,'
or 'Justice,' it's all one to me; they're good wares. I got
'em both for notliing, and I sell 'em at a fair profit. But
you'll Avant more than one of a sort?"

" Xo, no; here's a white quattrino for the two," said
Eomola, folding up the bills and hurrying aAvay.

She Avas soon in the outer cloisters of San Marco, where
Fra Salvestro Avas aAvaiting her under the cloister, but did
not notice the approiich of her light step. He Avas chat-
ting, according to his habit, Avith lay visitors; for under
the auspices of a government friendly to the Frate, the
timidity about frequenting San Marco, Avhich had foUoAved
on the first shock of the Excommunication, had been grad-
ually giving Avay. In one of those lay visitors she recognized
a Avell-knoAvn satellite of Francesco Valori, named Andrea
Cambini, Avho was narrating or expounding with emphatic
gesticulation, Avhile Fi-a >Salvestro Avas listening Avith that
air of trivial curiosity which tells that the listenercares very
much about news and very little about its quality. This

PLEADING. 457

characteristic of her confessor, which was always repulsive to
Eomola, was made exasperating to her at this moment by the
certainty she gathered, from tlie disjointed words which
reached her ear, that Cambini was narrating something
relative to the fate of the conspirators. She chose not to
approach the group, but as soon as she sav/ that she had
arrested Fra Salvestro's attention, she turned toward the
door of the chapter-house, while he, making a sign of
approval, disappeared Avithin the inner cloister. A lay
Brother stood ready to open the door of the chapter-house
for her, and closed it behind her as she entered.

Once more looked at by those sad frescoed figures which
had seemed to be mourning with her at the death of her
brother Dino, it was inevitable that something of that
scene should come back to her; but the intense occupation
of her mind with the present made the remembrance less
a retrospect than an indistinct recurrence of impressions
which blended themselves with her agitating fears, as if
her actual anxiety were a revival of the strong yearning-
she had once before brought to this spot — to be repelled
by marble rigidity. She gave no space for tlie remem-
brance to become more definite, for she at once opened the
handbills, thinking she should perhaps be able to read
them in the interval before Fra Clirolamo appeared. But
by the time she had read to the end of the one that recom-
mended the observance of the law, the door was opening,
and doubling up the papers she stood expectant.

When the Frate had entered she knelt, according to the
usual practice of those who saw him in private; but as
soon as he had uttered a benedictory greeting she rose and
stood opposite to him at a few yards' distance. Owing to
his seclusion since he had been excommunicated, it had
been an unusually long while since she had seen him, and
the late months had visibly deepened in his face the marks
of over-taxed mental activity and bodily severities; and
yet Romola was not so conscious of this change as of
another, which was less definable. Was it that the expres-
sion of serene elevation and pure human fellowsliip which
had once moved her was no longer present in the same
force, or was it that the sense of his being divi'ded from
her in her feeling about her godfather roused the slumber-
ing sources of alienation, and marred her own vision?
Perhaps both causes were at work. Our relations with our
fellow-men are most often determined by coincident cur-
rents of that sort; the inexcusable word or deed seldom

458 EOMOLA.

comes until after affection or reverence has been already
enfeebled by the strain of rejjeated excuses.

It was true that Savonarola's glance at Komola had
something of that hardness which is caused by an egotistic
prepossession. He divined that tlie interview which she
had sought was to turn on the fate of the conspirators, a
subject on which he had already had to quell inner voices
that might become loud again when encouraged from
without. Seated in his cell, correcting the sheets of liis
"• Triumph of the Cross," it was easier to repose on a resolu-
tion of neutrality.

"It is a question of moment, doubtless, on which you
wish to see me, my daughter," he began, in a tone which
was gentle rather from self-control than from immediate
iuclination. "I know you are not wont to lay stress on
small matters."

"Father, you know what it is before I tell you," said
Eomola, forgetting everything else as soon as she began to
l)our forth her plea. " You know what I am caring for —
it is for the life of the old man I love best in the world.
The thought of him has gone together with the thought of
my father as long as I remember the daylight. That is my
warrant for coming to you, even if my coming should have
been needless. Perhaps it is: perhaps you have already
determined that your power over the hearts of men shall
be used to prevent tliem from denying to Florentines a
right which you yourself helped to earn for them."

"I meddle not with the functions of the State, my
daughter," said Fra Girolamo, strongly disinclined to re-
open externally a debate which he had already gone through
inwardly. " I have preached and labored that Florence
should have a good government, for a good government is
needful to the perfecting of the Christian life; but 1 keep
away my hands from particular affairs which it is the office
of experienced citizens to administer."

"Surely, father " Romola broke off. She had

uttered this first word almost impetuously, but she was
ciiecked by the counter-agitation of feeling herself in an
attitude of remonstrance toward the man who had been
the source of guidance and strength to her. In the act of
rebelling she was bruising her own reverence.

Savonarola was too keen not to divine something of the
conflict that was arresting her — too noble, deliberately to ,
assume in calm speech that self-justifying evasiveness into

PLEADIXQ. 459

which he was often hurried in public bv the crowdin"-
impulses of the orator. " "^

''Say what is in your heart; speak on, mv "daughter,"
he said, standing with his arms laid one upon the other
and looking at her with quiet expectation.

_ ''I was going to say, father, that this matter is surely of
higher moment than many about which I have heard vou
preach and exhort fervidly. If it belono-ed to vou to ur<Te
that men condemned for oifenses against the State should
have the right to appeal to the Great Council— if— " Rom-
ola was getting eager again — "if vou count it a glory to
have won that right for them, can it less belong to you to
declare yourself against the right being denied to almost
the first men who need it? Surely that touches the Chris-
tian life more closely than whether you knew beforehand
that the Dauphin would die, or whether Pisa will be con-
quered."

There was a subtle movement, like a subdued sign of
pain in Savonarola's strong lips, before he began to speak.

"My daughter, I speak as it is given me to speak— I am
not master of the times when I may become the vehicle of
knowledge beyond the common lights of men. In this
case I have no illumination beyond what wisdom may
give to those who are charged with the safety of the State.
As to the law of Appeal against the Six Votes, I labored
to have it passed in order that no Florentine should be sub-
ject to loss of life and goods through the private hatred
of a few who might happen to be in power: but these five
men, Avho have desired to overthrow a free government
and restore a corrupt tyrant, have been condemned with
the assent of a large assembly of their fellow-citizens.
They refused at first to have their cause brought before
the Great Council. They have lost the right to the
appeal,"

"How can they have lost it?" said Romola. "It is
the right to appeal against condemnation, and they have
never been condemned till now; and, forgive me, father, it is
private hatred that would deny them the appeal: it is the
violence of the few that frightens others; else why was
the assembly divided again directly after it had seemed to
agree? And if anything weighs against the observance of
the law, let this weigh /or it — this, that you used to preach
more earnestly than all else, that there should be no place
given to hatred and bloodshed because of these party
strifes, so that private ill-will should not find its oppor-

460 ROMOLA.

tunities in public act;;. Father, you know that there is
private hatred concerned here : will it not dishonor 3'ou not
to have interposed on the side of mercy, when there are
many who hold th;it it is also the side of law and justice?"'

"My daughter," said Fra Girolamo, with more visible
emotion than before, " there is a mercy which is weakness,
and even treason against the common good. The safety of
Florence, which means even more than the welfare of
Florentines, now demands severity, as it once demanded
mercy. It is not only for a past plot that these men are
condemned, but also for a plot which has not yet been
executed; and the devices that are leading to its execution
are not put an end to: the tyrant is still gathering his
forces in Eomagna, and the enemies of Florence, who sit
in the highest places of Italy, are ready to hurl any stone
that will crush her."

"What plot?" said Romola, reddening, and trembling
with alarmed surprise.

"You carry papers in your hand, I see," said Fra Gir-
olamo, pointing to the handbills. "One of them will,
perhaps, tell you that the government has had new infor-
mation."

Eomola hastily opened the handbill she had not yet read,
and saw that the government had now positive evidence
of a second plot, which was to have been carried out in
this August time. To her mind it was like reading a con-
firmation that Tito had won his safety by foul means; his
pretense of wishing that the Frate should exert himself
on behalf of the condemned only helped the wretched
conviction. She crushed up the paper in her hand, and,
turning to Savonarola, she said, with new passion, "Father,
Avliat safety can there be for Florence when the worst
man can always escape? And," she went on, a sudden
flash of remembrance coming from the thought about
her husband, "have you not yourself encouraged this
deception which corrupts the life of Florence, by wanting
more favor to be shown to Lorenzo Tornal)uoni, who has
worn two faces, and flattered you with a show of affec-
tion, when my godfather has always been honest? Ask
all Florence who of those five men has the truest heart,
and there will not be many who will name any other name
than Bernardo del Nero. " You did interpose with Fran-
cesco Valor i for the sake of one prisoner: you have not
then been neutral; and you know that your word will be
powerful."

PLEADING. 461

"1 do not desire the death of Bernardo," said Savoua-
rohi, coloring deeply. " It would be enough if he were
sent out of the city."

"Then why do you not speak to save an old man of
seventy-five from dying a death of ignominy — to give him
at least the fair chances of the law?" burst out Romola,
the impetuosity of her nature so roused that she forgot
everything but her indignation. " It is not, that you feel
l)ound to be neutral; else why did yon speak for Lorenzo
Tornabuoni? You spoke for him because he is more
friendly to San Marco; my godfather feigns no friendship.
It is not, then, as a Medicean that my godfather is to die;
it is as a man you have no love for I "

When Romola paused, with cheeks glowing, and with
quivering lips, there was dead silence. As she saw Fra
Giralamo standing motionless before her, she seemed to
lierself to be hearing her own words over again; words that
in this echo of consciousness were in strange, painful dis-
sonance with the memories that made part of his presence
to her. The moments of silence were expanded by gather-
ing compunction and self-doubt. She had committed sac-
rilege in her passion. And even the sense that she could
retract nothing of her plea, that her mind could not
submit itself to Savonarola's negative, made it the more
needful to her to satisfy those reverential memories. With
a sudden movement toward him she said —

'* Forgive me, father; it is pain to me to have spoken
those words — yet I cannot help speaking. I am little and
feeble compared with you; you brought me light and
strength. But I submitted because I felt the proffered
strength — because I saw the light. Now I cannot see it.
Father, you yourself declare that there comes a moment
when the soul must have no guide but the voice within it,
to tell whether the consecrated thing has sacred virtue.
And therefore I must speak."

Savonarola had that readily-roused resentment toward
opposition, hardly separable from a power -loving and
powerful nature, accustomed to seek great ends that
cast a reflected grandeur on the means by which they
are sought. His sermons have much of that red flame
in them. And if he had been a meaner man his suscepti-
bility might have shown itself in irritation at Romola's
accusatory freedom, which was in strong contrast with the
deference he habitually received from his disciples. But at
this moment his feelings were nullified by the hard strug-

462 ROMOLA.

gle which made half the traged}' of his life — the struggle
of a mind possessed by a never-silent hunger after purit}-
and simplicity, yet caught in a tangle of egoistic demands,
false ideas, and difficult outward conditions, that made sim-
plicity impossible. Keenly alive to all the suggestions of
Romola's remonstrating words,' he was rapidly surveying, as
he had done befoiC, the courses of action that were open to
him, and their probable results. But it was a question
on which arguments could seem decisive only in propor-
tion as they were charged with feeling, and he had received
no imiwlse that could alter his bias. He looked at Romola,
and said —

''You have full pardon for your frankness, my daugh-
ter. You speak, I know, out of the fullness of your family
affection. But these affections must give way to the needs
of the Republic. If those men who have a close acquaint-
ance with the affairs of the State believe, as I understand
they do, that the public safety requires the extreme punish-
ment of the law to fall on the five conspirators, I cannot
control their opinion, seeing that I stand aloof from such
affairs."

" Then you desire that they should die? You desire
that the Appeal should be denied them?" said Romola,
feeling anew repelled by a vindication which seemed to
her to have the nature of a subterfuge.

"I have said that I do not desire their death."

''Then," said Romola, her indignation rising again,
"you can be indifferent that Florentines should inflict
death which you do not desire, when you might have pro-
tested against it — when you might have helped to hinder it,
by urging the observance of a law which you held it good
to get passed. Father, you used not to stand aloof: you
used not to shrink from protesting. Do not say you can-
not protest where the lives of men are concerned; say
rather, you desire their death. Say rather, you hold it
good for Florence that there shall be more blood and more
hatred. Will the death of five Mediceans put an end to
parties in Florence? Will the death of a noble old man
like Bernardo del Nero save a city that holds such men as
DolfoSpini?"

"My daughter, it is enough. The cause of freedom,
which is the cause of God's kingdom upon earth, is often
most injured by the enemies who carry within them the
power of certain human virtues. The wicTiedest man

PLEADING. 4G3

is often not the most insurmountable obstacle to the tri-
umph of good."

''Then why do you say again, that you do not desire
my godfather's death ? " said Romola, in mingled anger
and despair. " Rather, you hold it the more needful "he
should die because he is the better man. I cannot unravel
your thoughts, father; I cannot hear the real voice of your
judgment and conscience."

There was a moment's pause. Then Savonarola said,
with keener emotion than he had yet shown —

"Be thankful, my daughter, if your own soul has been
spared perplexity; and judge not those to whom a harder
lot has been given. Vou see one ground of action in this
matter. I see many. I liave to choose that which will
further the work intrusted to me. The end I seek is one
to which minor respects must be sacrificed. The deatli of
five men — were they less guilty than these — is a light
matter weighed against the withstanding of the vicious
tyrannies which stifle the life of Italy, and foster the cor-
ruption of the Church; a light matter weighed against the
furthering of God's kingdom upon earth, the end for which
I live and am willing myself to die."

Under any other circumstances, Romola would have
been sensitive to the appeal at the beginning of Savona-
rola's speech; but at this moment she was so utterly in
antagonism with him, that what he called perplexity
seemed to her sophistry and doubleness; and as he went on,
his words only fed that flame of indignation, which now
again, more fully than ever before, lit up the memory of
all his mistakes, and made her trust in him seem to have
been a purblind delusion. She spoke almost with bitterness.

" Do you, then, know so well what will further the
coming of God's kingdom, father, that you will dare to
despise the plea of mercy — of justice — of faithfulness to
your own teaching? Has the French king, then, brought
renovation to Italy? Take care, father, lest your enemies
have some reason wlien they say, that in your visions of
what will further God's kingdom you see only what will
strengthen your own party."

"And that is true!" said Savonarola, with flashing eyes.
Romola's voice had seemed to him in that moment the
voice of his enemies. "The cause of my party is the
cause of God's kingdom."

"I do not believe it!" said Romola, her whole frame
shaken with passionate repugnance. " God's kingdom is

4(Ji ROMOLA.

something wider — else, let me stand outside it with the
beings that I love."

Tlie two faces were lit up, each with an opposite emotion,
each with an opposite certitude. Further words were
impossible. Komola hastily covered her head and went
out in silence.

CHAPTER LX.

THE SCAFFOLD.

Three days later the moon that was just surmounting
the buildings of the piazza in front of the Old Palace
within the hour of midnight, did not make the usual broad
lights and shadows on the pavement. Not a hand's-breadth
of pavement was to be seen, but only the heads of an eager
struggling multitude. And instead of that background of
silence in which the j)attering footstejDS and buzzing voices,
the lute-thrnmming or rapid scampering of the many
night wanderers of Florence stood out in obtrusive dis"-
tinctness, tliere was the background of a roar from mingled
shouts and imprecations, trampliugs and pushings, and
accidental clashing of weapons, across which nothing was
distinguishable but a darting shriek, or the heavy dropping
toll of a bell.

Almost all Avho could call themselves the public of Flor-
ence Avere awake at that hour, and either enclosed within
the limits of that piazza, or struggling to enter it. Within
the palace were still assembled in the council chamber
all the chief magistracies, the eighty members of the senate,
and the other select citizens Avho had been in hot debate
through long hours of daylight and torchlight whether the
Appeal should be grantecl or whether the sentence of death
should be executed on the prisoners forthwith, to forestall
the dangerous chances of delay. And the debate had been
so much like fierce cpiarrel that the noise from the council
chamber had reached the crowd outside. Onlv within the
last hour had the question been decided: the Signoria had
remained divided, four of them standing out resolutely for
the Appeal in spite of the strong argument that if they did
not give way their houses should be sacked, until Francesco
Valori, in brief and furious speech, made the determina-

THE SCAFFOLD. 465

tion of his party more ominously distinct by declaring that
if the Signoria would not defend the liberties of the Flor-
entine people by executing those five perfidious citizens,
there would not be wanting others who would take that
cause in hand to the peril of all who opposed it. The
Florentine Cato triumphed. When the votes were counted
again, the four obstinate white beans no longer appeared;
the whole nine were of the fatal affirmative black, deciding
the death of the five prisoners without delay — deciding
also, only tacitly and with much more delay, the death of
Francesco Valori.

And now, while the judicial Eight were gone to the
Bargello to prepare for the execution, the five condemned
men were being led barefoot and in irons through the
midst of the council. It was their friends who had con-
trived this: would, not Florentines be moved by the visible
association of such cruel ignominy with two venerable men
like Bernardo del Nero and Xiccolo Eidolfi, who had
taken their bias long before the new order of things had
come to make Mediceanism retrograde — with two brilliant
popular young men like Tornabuoni and Pucci, whose
absence would be felt as a haunting vacancy wherever there
was a meeting of chief Florentines? It was useless: such
pity as could be awakened now was of that hopeless sort
which leads not to rescue, but to the tardier action of
revenge.

While this scone was passing up-stairs Romola stood
below against one of the massive pillars in the court of the
palace, expecting the moment when her godfather would
appear, on his way to execution. By the use of strong
interest she had gained permission to visit him in the
evening of this day, and remain with him until the result
of the council should be determined. And now she was
waiting with his confessor to follow the guard that would
lerd him to the Bargello. Her heart was bent on clinging
to the presence of t)ae childless old man to the last
moment, as her father would have done; and she had
overpowered all remonstrances. Giovan Battisto Ridolfi,
a disciple of Savonarola, who was going in bitterness to
behold the death of his elder brother Niccolo, had prom-
ised that she should be guarded, and noAV stood by her
side.

Tito, too, was in the palace; but Eomola had not seen
him. Since the evening of the seventeenth they had
avoided each other, and Tito only knew by inference from
30

466 ROMOLA.

the report of the Frate's neutrality that her pleading had
failed. He was now surrounded with official and other
personages, both Florentine and foreign, who had been
awaiting the issue of the long-protracted council, main-
taining, except when he was directly addressed, the subdued
air and grave silence of a man whom actual events are
placing in a painful state of strife between public and
private feeling. When an allusion was made to his wife
in relation to those events, he implied that, owing to the
violent excitement of her mind, the mere fact of his con-
tinuing to hold office under a government concerned in
her godfather's condemnation, roused in her a diseased
hostility toward him; so that for her sake he felt it best
not to approach her.

''Ah, the old Bardi blood!" said Cennini, Avith a shrug.
" I shall not be surprised if tliis business shakes her loose
from the Frate, as Avell as some others I could name."

"It is excusable in a woman, who is doubtless beautiful,
since she is the wife of Messer Tito," said a young French
envoy, smiling and bowing to Tito, "to think that her
affections must overrule the good of the State, and that
nobody is to be beheaded who is anybody's cousin; but
such a view is not to be encouraged in the male population.
It seems to me your Florentine polity is much weakened
by it."

"That is true," said Niccolo Macchiavelli; "but where
personal ties are strong, the hostilities they raise must
be taken due account of. Many of these half-way severi-
ties are mere hot-headed blundering. The only safe blows
to be inflicted on men and parties are the blows that are
too heavy to be avenged."

"Niccolo," said C-ennini, "there is a clever wickedness
in thy talk sometimes that makes me mistrust thy i)leasant
young face as if it were a mask of Satan."

"Not at all, my good Domenico," said Macchiavelli,
smiling, and laying his hand on the elder's shoulder.
"Satan was a blunderer, an introducer of novita, who
made a stupendous failure. If he had succeeded, we
should all have been worshiping him, and his portrait
would have been more flattered."

"Well, well," said Cennini, "I say not thy doctrine is
not too clever for Satan: I only say it is wicked enough for
him."

"I tell you," said Macchiavelli, "my doctrine is tlie
doctrine of all men who seek an end a little farther off than

THE SCAFFOLD. 467

their own noses. Ask onr Frate, our projDhet, how his
universal renovation is to be brought about: he will tell
you, first, by getting a free and pure government; and
since it appears that this cannot be done by making all
Florentines love each other, it must be done by cutting off
every head that happens to be obstinately in the way.
Only if a man incurs odium by sanctioning a severity that
is not thorough enough to be final, he commits a blunder.
And something like that blunder, I suspect, the Frate has
committed. It was an occasion on which he might have
won some lustre by exerting himself to maintain the
Appeal; instead of that, he has lost lustre, and has gained
no strength."

Before any one else could speak, there came the expected
announcement that the prisoners were about to leave the
council chamber, and the majority of those who were
present hurried toward the door, intent on securing the
freest passage to the Eargello in the rear of the prisoners'
guard; for the scene of the execution was one that drew
alike those who were moved by the deepest passions and
those who were moved by the coldest curiosity.

Tito was one of those who remained behind. He had a
native repugnance to sights of death and pain, and five
days ago whenever he had thought of this execution as a
possibility he had hoped that it would not take place, and
that the utmost sentence would be exile: his own safety
demanded no more. But now he felt that it would be a
welcome guarantee of his security when he had learned
that Bernardo del Nero's head was off the shoulders. The
new knowledge and new attitude toward him disclosed by
Romola on the day of his return, had given him a new
dread of the power she possessed to make his position
insecure. If any act of hers only succeeded in making him
an object of suspicion and odium, he foresaw not only
frustration, but frustration under unpleasant circum-
stances. Her belief in Baldassarre had clearly determined
her wavering feelings against further submission, and if
her godfather lived she would win him to share her belief
without much trouble. Romola seemed more than ever an
unmanageable fact in his destiny. But if Bernardo del
Nero were dead, the difficulties that would beset her in
placing herself in opposition to her husband would prob-
ably be insurmountable to her shrinking pride. There-
fore Tito had felt easier when he knew that the Eight had
gone to the Bargello to order tJie instant erection of the

468 ROMOLA.

scaffold. Four other men — his intimates and confeder-
ates— were to die, besides Bernardo del Nero. But a man's
own safety is a god that sometimes makes very grim
demands. Tito felt them to be grim: even in the pursuit
of what was agreeable, this paradoxical life forced upon
him the desire for what was disagreeable. But he had had
other experience of this sort, and as he heard through the
open doorway the shuffle of many feet and tiie clanking of
metal on the stairs, he was able to answer the questions of
the young French envoy without showing signs of any
other feeling than that of sad resignation to State neces-
sities.

Those sounds fell on Eomola as if her power of hearing
had been exalted along with every other sensibility of her
nature. She needed no arm to support her; she shed no
tears. She felt that intensity of life which seems to tran-
scend both grief and joy — in which the mind seems to itself
akin to elder forces that wrought out existence before the
birth of pleasure and pain. Since her godfather's fate had
been decided, the previous struggle of feeling in her had
given way to an identification of herself with him in
these supreme moments: she was inwardly asserting for
him that, if he suffered the punishment of treason, he did
not deserve the name of traitor; he was the victim to
a collision between two kinds of faithfulness. It
Avas not given him to die for the noblest cause,
and yet he died because of his nobleness. He might
have been a meaner man and found it easier not to incur
this guilt. Romola was feeling the full force of that sym-
pathy with the individual lot that is continually opposing
itself to the formulae by which actions and parties are
judged. She was treading the way with her second father
to the scaffold, and nerving herself to defy ignominy by
the consciousness that it was not deserved.

The way was fenced in by three hundred armed men,
who had been placed as a guard by the orders of Francesco
Valori, for among the apparent contradictions that belonged
to this event, not the least striking was the alleged alarm
on the one hand at the popular rage against the con-
spirators, and the alleged alarm on the other lest there
should be an attempt to rescue them in the midst of a
hostile crowd. When they had arrived within the court of
the Bargello, Romola was allowed to approach Bernardo
with his confessor for a moment of farewell, ^[any eyes
were bent on them even in that struggle of an agitated

THE SCAFFOLD 4^19

throug, as the aged man, forgetting that liis hands were
bound with irons, lifted them toward the golden head that
was bent toward him, and then, checking that movement,
leaned to kiss her. She seized the fettered hands that
were hung down again, and kissed them as if they had
been sacred things.

''My poor Eomola," said Bernardo, in a low voice,
''I have only to die, but thou hast to live — and I shall
not be there to help thee."

''Yes," said Eomola, hurriedly, "you 2uill help me —
always — because I shall remember you."

She was taken away and conducted up the flight of steps
that led to the loggia surrounding the grand old court.
She took her place there, determined to look till the
moment when her godfather laid his head on the block.
XoAv while the prisoners were allowed a brief interval with
their confessor, the spectators were pressing into court
until the crowd became dense around the black scaffold,
and the torches fixed in iron rings against the pillars
threw a varying startling light at one moment on passion-
less stone carvings, at another on some pale face agitated
with suppressed rage or suppressed grief — the face of one
among the many near relatives of the condemned, who
were presently to receive their dead and carry them home.

Romola's face looked like a marble image against the
dark arch as she stood watching for the moment when her
godfather would appear at the foot of the scaffold. He
was to suffer first, and Battista Ridolfi, who was by her
side, had promised to take her away through a door behind
them when she would have seen the last look of the man
who alone in all the world had shared her i3it3-ing love for
her father. And still, in the background of her thought,
there was the possibility striving to be a hoj^e, that some
rescue might yet come, something that would keep that
scaffold unstained by blood.

For a long while there was constant movement, lights
flickering, heads swaying to and fro, confused voices
within the court, rushing waves of sound through the
entrance from without. It seemed to Eomola as if she
were in the midst of a storm-troubled sea, caring nothing
about the storm, caring only to hold out a signal till the
eyes that looked for it could seek it no more.

Suddenly there was stillness, and the very tapers seemed
to tremble into quiet. The executioner was ready on the
scaffold, and Bernardo del Xero was seen ascending it with

470 ROMOLA.

a slow firm step, Roniola made no visible movement,
uttered not even a suppressed sound: she stood more firmly,
caring for his firmness. She saw him pause, saw the
white head kept erect, while he said, in a voice distinctly
audible —

"It is but a short space of life that my fellow-citizens
have taken from me."

She perceived that he was gazing slowly round him as
he spoke. She felt that his eyes were resting on her, and
that she was stretching out her arms toward him. Then
she saw no more till — a long while after, as it seemed — a
voice said, " My daughter, all is peace now. I can con-
duct you to your house."

She uncovered her head, and saw her godfathers con-
fessor standing by her, in a room where there were other
grave men talking in subdued tones.

"I am readv," she said starting up. ''Let us lose no
time."

She thought all clinging was at an end for her: all her
strength now should be given to escape from a grasp under
which she shuddered.

CHAPTER LXI.

DRIFTING AWAY.

On the eighth day from that memorable night Romola
was standing on the brink of the Mediterranean, watching
the gentle summer pulse of the sea just above what was
then the little fishing village of Viareggio.

Again she had fled from Florence, and this time no
arresting v.oice had called her back. Again she Avore the
gray religious dress; and this time, in her heart-sickness,
she did not care that it was a disguise. A new rebellion
had risen within her, a new despair. Why should she
care about wearing one badge more than another, or about
being called by her own name? She despaired of finding
any consistent duty belonging to that name. What force
was there to create for her that supremely hallowed motive
which men call duty, but which can have no inward con-
straining existence save through some form of believing
love?

DRIFTING AWAY. 471

The bonds of all strong affection were snapped. In her
marriage, the highest bond of all, she had ceased to see
the mystic nnion which is its own guarantee of indissoln-
bleness, had ceased even to see the obligation of a volun-
tary pledge: had she not proved that the things to which
she had pledged herself were impossible? The impulse to
set herself free had risen again with overmastering force:
yet the freedom could only be an exchange of calamity.
There is no compensation for the woman who feels that
the chief relation of her life has been no more than a mis-
take. She has lost her crown. The deepest secret of
human blessedness has half whispered itself to her, and
then forever passed her by.

And now Romola's best support under that supreme
woman's sorrow had slipped away from her. The vision
of any great purpose, any end of existence which could
ennoble endurance and exalt the common deeds of a dusty
life with divine ardors, was utterly eclipsed for her now
by the sense of a confusion in human things which made
all effort a mere dragging at tangled threads; all fellow-
ship, either for resistance or advocacy, mere unfairness and
exclusiveness. What, after all, was the man wlio had rep-
resented for her the highest heroism: the heroism not of
hard, self-contained endurance, but of willing, self-offer-
ing love? What was the cause he was struggling for?
Romola had lost her trust in Savonarola, had lost that
fervor of admiration which had made her unmindful of his
aberrations, and attentive only to the grand curve of his
orbit. And now that her keen feeling for her godfather
had thrown her into antagonism with the Frate, she saw
all the repulsive and inconsistent details in his teaching
with a painful lucidity which exaggerated their proportions.
In the bitterness of her disappointment she said that his
striving after the renovation of the Church and the world
was a striving after a mere name which told no more than
the title of a book: a name that had come to mean practi-
cally the measures that would strengthen his own position
in Florence; nay, often questionable deeds and words, for
the sake of saving his influence from suffering by his own
errors. And that political reform which had once made a
new interest in her life seemed now to reduce itself to nar-
row devices for the safety of Florence, in contemptible
contradiction with the alternating professions of blind trust
in the Divine cai-e.

It was inevitable that she should judge the Frate unfairly

472 ROMOLA.

on a question of individual suffering, at which she looked
with the eyes of personal tenderness, and he with the eyes
of theoretic conviction. In that declaration of his, that
the canse of his party was the cause of God^s kingdom,
she heard only the ring of egoism. Perhaps such words
have rarely been uttered without that meaner ring in them;
yet they are the implicit formula of all energetic belief.
And if such energetic belief, pursuing a grand and remote
end, is often in danger of becoming a demon-worship, in
which the votary lets his son and daughter pass through
the fire with a readiness that hardly looks like sacrifice:
tender fellow-feeling for the nearest has its danger too,
and is apt to be timid and skeptical toward the larger aims
without which life cannot rise into religion. In this way
jDoor Komola was being blinded by her tears.

No one who has ever known what it is thus to lose faith
in a fellow-man whom he has profoundly loved and rever-
enced, will lightly say that the shock can leave the faith in
the Invisible Goodness unshaken. With the sinking of
high liuman trust, the dignity of life sinks too; we cease
to believe in our own better self, since that also is part of
the common nature which is degraded in our thought; and
all the finer impulses of the soul are dulled. Eomola felt
even the springs of her once active pity drying up, and
leaving her to barren egoistic complaining. Had not she
had her sorrows too? And few had cared for her, while
she had cared for many. She had done enough; she had
striven after the impossible, and was weary of this stifling,
crowded life. She longed for that repose in mere sensation
which she had sometimes dreamed of in the sultry after-
noons of her early girlhood, when she had fancied herself
floating naia.d-like in the waters.

The clear waves seemed to invite her: she wished she
could lie down to sleep on them, and pass from sleep into
deatli. But Romola could not directly seek death; the full-
ness of young life in her forbade that. She could only
wis]i that death would come.

At the spot where she had paused, there was a deep bend
in the shore, and a small boat with a sail was moored
there. In her longing to glide over the waters that were
getting golden with the level sun-rays, she thought of a
story which had been one of the things she had loved to
dwell on in Boccaccio, when her father fell asleep and she
glided from her stool to sit on the floor and read the "'De-
cameron." It was the story of that fair Gostanza, who, in

DRIFTING AWAY. 473

her love-lornness, desired to live no longer; but, not hav-
ing the courage to attack her young life, had put herself
into a boat and pushed off to sea; then, Iving down in the
boat, had wrapped her mantle round her" head, hoping to
be wrecked, so that her fear would be helpless to flee from
death. The memory had remained a mere thought in
Eomola's mind, without budding into any distinct wish;
but now, as she paused again in her Avalking to and fro,
she saw gliding black against the red gold another boat
with one man it, making toward the bend where the first
and smaller boat was moored. Walking on again, she at
length saw the man land, pull his boat ashore and begin
to unlade something from it. He was perhaps the owner .
of the smaller boat also: he would be going away soon, '
and her opportunity would be gone with him — her oppor-
tunity of buying that smaller boat. She had not yet ad-
mitted to herself that she meant to use it, but she felt a
siidden eagerness to secure the possibility of using it, which
disclosed the half-unconscious growth of a thought into a
desire.

''Is that little boat yours also?" she said to the fisher-
man, who had looked up, a little startled by the tall gray
figure, and had made a reverence to this holy Sister wan-
deinng thus mysteriously in the evening solitude.

It ivas his boat; an old one, hardly seaworthy, yet worth
repairing to any man who would buy it. By the blessing
of San Antonio, whose chapel was in the village yonder,
his fishing had prospered, and he had now a better boat,
which had once been Gianni's, who died. But he had
not yet sold the old one. Komola asked him how much
it was worth, and then, while he was busy, thrust the
price into a little sachel lying on the ground and con-
taining the remnant of his dinner. After that, she
watched him furling his sail and asked him how he
should set it if he wanted to go out to sea, and then
pacing up and down again, waited to see him depart.

The imagination of herself gliding away in that boat
on the darkening waters was growing more and more into
a longing, as the thought of a cool brook in sultriness
becomes a painful thirst. To be freed from the burden
of choice when all motive was bruised, to commit herself,
sleeping, to destiny which would either bring death or else
new necessities that might rouse a new life in her! — it
was a thought that beckoned her the more because the

•A74 ROMOLA.

soft evening air made her long to rest in the still solitude,
instead of going back to the noise and heat -of the village.

At last the slow fisherman had gathered up all his
movables and was walking away. Soon the gold was
shrinking and getting duskier in sea and sky, and there
was no living thing in sight, no sound but the lulling
monotony of the lapping waves. In this sea there was no
tide that would help to carry her away if she waited for
its ebb; but Eomola thought the breeze from the land
was rising a little. She got into the boat, unfurled the
sail, and fastened it as she had learned in that first brief
lesson. She saw that it caught the light breeze, and this
was all she cared for. Then she loosed the boat from its
moorings, and tried to urge it with an oar, till she was
far out from tlie land, till the sea was dark even to the
west, and the stars were disclosing themselves like a palpi-
tating life over the wide heavens. Eesting at last, she
threw back her cowl, and, taking off the kerchief under-
neath, which confined her hair, she doubled them both
under her head for a pillow on one of the boat's ribs.
The fair head was still very young and could bear a hard
pillow.

And so she lay, with the soft night air breathing on her
Avhile she glided on the water and watched the deepening
quiet of the sky. She was alone now: she had freed her-
self from all claims, she had freed herself even from that
burden of choice which presses with heavier and heavier
weight when claims have loosed their guiding hold.

Had she found anything like the dream of her girlhood?
No. Memories hung upon her like the weight of broken
wings that could never be lifted — memories of human
sympathy which even in its pains leaves a thirst that the
Great Mother has no milk to still. Eomola felt orphaned
in those wide spaces of sea and sky. She read no message
of love for her in that far-off symbolic writing of the
heavens, and with a great sob she wished that she might
be gliding into death.

She drew the cowl over her head again and covered her
face, choosing darkness rather than the light of the stars,
which seemed to lier like the hard light of eyes that looked
at her without seeing her. Presently she felt that she was
in the grave, but not resting there: she was touching the
hands of the beloved dead beside her, and trying to wake
them.

THE BEXEDICTION. 475

CHAPTER LXII.

THE BENEDICTION.

About ten o'clock on the morning of the twenty-seventh
of February the currents of passengers along the Floren-
tine streets set decidedly toward San Marco. It was the
last morning of the Carnival, and every one knew there
was a second Bonfire of Vanities being prepared in front
of the Old Palace; but at this hour it was evident that the
centre of popular interest lay elsewhere.

The Piazza di San Marco was filled by a multitude who
showed no other movement than that which proceeded
fropi the pressure of new-comers trying to force their way
forward from all the openings: but the front ranks were
already close -serried and resisted the pressure. Those
ranks were ranged around a semicircular barrier in front
of the church, and within this barrier were already assem-
bling the Dominican Brethren of San Marco.

But the temporary wooden pulpit erected over the
church-door was still empty. It was presently to be
entered by the man whom the Pope's command had ban-
ished from the pulpit of the Duomo, whom the other
ecclesiastics of Florence had been forbidden to consort
with, whom the citizens had been forbidden to hear on
])ain of excommuni'cation. This man had said, '''A wicked,
unbelieving Pope, Avho has gained the pontifical chair by
bribery is not Christ's Vicar. His curses are broken
swords: he grasps a hilt without a blade. His commands
are contrary to the Christian life: it is lawful to disobey
them — nay, it is not lawful to obey them." And the
people still flocked to hear him as he preached in his own
cluirch of San Marco, though the Pope was hanging ter-
rible threats over Florence if it did not renounce the
pestilential schismatic and send him to Rome to be
"converted" — still, as on this very morning, accepted
the Communion from his excommunicated hands. For
how if this Frate had really more command over the
Divine lightnings than that official successor of Saint
Peter? It was a momentous question, which for the mass
of citizens could never be decided by the Prate's ultimate
test, namely, what was and what was not accordant with
the highest spiritual law. Xo: in such a case ac thif, if
God had chosen the Frate as his prophet to rebuke the

476 EOMOLA.

High Priest who carried the mystic raiment unworthily,
he would attest his choice by some unmistakable sign.
As long as the belief in the Prophet curried no threat of
outward calamity, but rather the confident hope of excep-
tional safety, no sign was needed : his preaching was a
music to which the people felt themselves marching along
the way they wished to go; but now that belief meant an
immediate blow to their commerce, the shaking of their
position among the Italian States, and an inteixlict on
their city, there inevitably came the question, "What
miracle showest thou?" Slowly at first, then faster and
fastei', that fatal demand had been swelling in Savona-
rola's ear, provoking a response, outwardly in the declara-
tion that at the fitting time the miracle would come;
inwardly in the faith — not unwavering, for what faith is
so? — that if the need for miracle became urgent, the
work he had before him was too great for the Divine
power to leave it halting. His faith wavered, but not his
speech: it is the lot of every man who has to speak for
the satisfaction of the crowd, that he must often sjjeak in
virtue of yesterday's faith, hoping it will come back
to-morrow.

It was in preparation for a scene which was really a
resjDonse to the poj^ular impatience for some supernatural
guarantee of the Proj^het's mission, that the wooden jjulpit
had been erected above the church-door. But while the
ordinary Frati in black mantles were entering and arranging
themselves, the faces of the multitude were not yet eagerly
directed toward the pulpit: it was felt that Savonarola
would not appear just yet, and there was some interest in
singling out the various monks, some of them belonging
to high Florentine families, many of them having fathers,
brothers, or cousins among the artisans and shopkeepers
who made the majority of the crowd. It was not till the
tale of monks was complete, not till they had fluttered
their books and had begun to chant, that people said to
each other, " Fra Girolamo must be coming now."

That expectation rather than any spell from the accus-
tomed wail of psalmody was what made silence and expecta-
tion seem to spread like a paling solemn light over the
multitude of upturned faces, all now directed toAvard the
empty pulpit.

The next instant the pulpit was no longer empty. A
figure covered from head to foot in bkick cowl and mantle
had entered it, and was kneeling with bent head and with

THE BEXEDICTTON". 477

face turned away. It seemed a weary time to the eager
people while the black figure knelt and the monks chanted.
But the stillness was not broken, for the Prate's audiences
with Heaven were yet charged with electric awe for that
mixed multitude, so that those who had already the will
to stone him felt their arms unnerved.

At last there was a vibration among the multitude, each
seeming to give his neighbor a momentary a.spen-like toucli,
as when men who have been watching for sometJiing in
the heavens see the expected presence silently disclosing
itself. The Frate had risen, turned toward the people,
and partly pushed back his cowl. The monotonous wail
of psalmody had ceased, and to those who stood near
the pulpit, it was as if the sounds which had just been
filling their ears had suddenly merged themselves in the
force of Savonarola's flashing glance, as he looked round
him in the silence. Then he stretched out his hands,
which, in their exquisite delic;icy, seemed transfigured
from an animal organ for grasping into vehicles of sensi-
bility too acute to need any gross contact: hands that came
like an appealing speech from that part of his soul which
was masked by his strong passionate face, written on now
with deeper lines about the mouth and brow than are
made by forty-four years of ordinary life.

At the first stretching out of the hands some of the
crowd in the front ranks fell on their knees, and here and
there a devout disciple farther off; but the great majority
stood firm, some resisting the impulse to kneel before this
excommunicated man (might not a great judgment fall
upon him even in this act of blessing?) — others jarred
with scorn and hatred of the ambitious deceiver who was
getting up this new comedy, before which, nevertheless,
they felt themselves impotent, as before the triumph of a
fashion.

But then came the voice, clear and low at first, uttering
the words of absolution — " Miser eat ur vestri" — and more
fell on their knees: and as it rose higher and yet clearer,
the erect heads became fewer and fewer, till, at the words
" Benedicat vos omni2)otens Deus," it rose to a masculine
cry, as if protesting its power to bless under the Clutch of
a demou^hat wanted to stifle it: it rang like a trumpet to
the extremities of the Piazza, and under it every head
was bowed.

After the utterance of that blessing. Savonarola himself
fell on his knees and hid his face in temporary exhaustion,

478 ROMOLA.

Those great jets of emotion were a necessary part of his
life; he himself had said to the people long ago, " With-
out preaching I cannot live." But it was a life that
shattered him.

In a few minutes more, some had risen to their feet, but
a larger number remained kneeling, and all faces were
intently watching him. He had taken into his hands a
crystal vessel, containing the consecrated Host, and was
about to address the people.

" You remember, my children, three days ago I besought
you, when I should hold this Sacrament in my hand in the
face of you all, to pray fervently to the Most High that if
this work of mine does not come from Him, He will send
a fire and consume me, that I may vanish into the eternal
darkness away from His light which I have hidden with
my falsity. Again I beseech you to make that prayer, and
to make it now."

It was a breathless moment: perhaps no man really
prayed, if some in a spirit of devout obedience made the
effort to pray. Every consciousness was chiefly possessed
by the sense that Savonarola was praying, in a voice not
loud, but distinctly audible in the wide stillness.

" Lord, if I have not wrought in sincerity of soul, if
my word cometh not from Thee, strike me in this moment
with Thy thunder, and let the fires of Thy wrath enclose
me."

He ceased to speak, and stood motionless, with the con-
secrated Mystery in his hand, with eyes uplifted and a
quivering excitement in his whole aspect. Every one else
was motionless and silent too, while the sunlight, which
for the last quarter of an hour had here and there been
piercing the grayness, made fitful streaks across the con-
vent wall, causing some awe-stricken spectators to start
timidly. But soon there was a wider parting, and with a
gentle quickness, like a smile, a stream of brightness
poured itself on the crystal vase, and then spread itself
over Savonarola's face with mild glorification.

An instantaneous shout rang through the Piazza,
" Behold the answer!"

The warm radiance thrilled through Savonarola's frame,
and so did the shout. It was his last moment of un-
troubled triumph, and in its rapturous confidence he felt
carried to a grander scene yet to come, before an audience
that would represent all Christendom, in whose presence
he should again be sealed as the messenger of the supreme

JUPENING SUHExVlES. 4;'()

righteousness, and feel himself full charged with Divine
strength. It was but a moment that expanded itself in
that prevision. While the shout was still ringing in his
ears he turned away within the church, feeling the strain
too great for him to bear it longer.

But when the Frate had disappeared, and the sunlight
seemed no longer to have anything special in its illumina-
tion, but was spreading itself impartially over all things
clean and unclean, there began, along with the general
movement of the crowd, a confusion of voices in which
certain strong discords and varying scales of laughter
made it evident that, in the previous silence and universal
kneeling, hostility and scorn had only submitted unwill-
ingly to a momentary spell.

"It seems to me the plaudits are giving way to criti-
cism," said Tito, who had been watching the scene attent-
ively from an upper loggia in one of the houses opposite
the church. " Nevertheless it was a striking moment, eh,
Messer Pietro? Fra Girolamo is a man to make one under-
stand that there was a time when the monk's frock was a
symbol of power over men's minds rather than over the
keys of women's cupboards."

"Assuredly," said Pietro Cennini. "And until I have
seen proof that Fra Girolamo has much less faith in God's
judgments than the common run of men, instead of having
considerably more, I shall not believe that he would brave
Heaven in this way if his soul were laden with a conscious
lie."

CHAPTER LXIII.

RIPENING SCHEMES.

A MONTH after that Carnival, one morning near the
end of March, Tito descended the marble steps of the Old
Palace, bound on a pregnant errand to San Marco. For
some reason, he did not choose to take the direct road,
which was but a slightly-bent line from the Old Palace; he
chose rather to make a circuit by the Piazza di Santa Croce,
where the people would be pouring out of the church after
the early sermon.

It Avas in the grand church of Santa Croce that the daily
Lenten sermon liad of late had the largest audience. For

480 KOMOLA.

Savonarola's voice had ceased to be heard even in his own
church of San M;irco, a hostile Signori;i having imposed
silence on him in obedience to a new letter from the Pope,
threatening the city with an immediate interdict if this
"wretched worm" and "monstrous idol"' were not forbid-
den to preach, and sent to demand pardon at Rome. And
next to hearing Fra Girolamo himself, the most exciting
Lenten occupation was to hear him argued against and vili-
fied. This excitement was to be had in Santa Croce, where
the Franciscan appointed to preach the Quaresimal sermons
had offered to clench his arguments by walking through the
fire with Fra Girolamo. Had not that schismatical Domin-
ican said that his prophetic doctrine would be proved
by a miracle at the fitting time? Here, then, was the
fitting time. Let Savonarola walk through the fire, and if
he came out unhurt, the Divine origin of his doctrine
would be demonstrated; but if the fire consumed him, his
falsity would be manifest; and that he might have no
excuse for evading the test, the Franciscan declared him-
self willing to be a victim to this high logic, and to be
burned for the sake of securing the necessary minor
premise,

Savonarola, according to his habit, had taken no notice
of these pulpit attacks. But it haj^pened that the zealous
preacher of Santa Croce was no other than the Fra Fran-
cesco di Puglia, who at Prato the year before had been
engaged in a like challenge with Savonarola's fervent fol-
lower, Fra Domenico, but had been called home by his
superiors while the heat was simjjly oratorical. Honest
Fra Domenico, then, Avho was preaching Lenten sermons
to the women in the Via del Cocomero, no sooner heard of
this new challenge than he took up the gauntlet for his
master, and declared himself ready to walk through the
fire with Fra Francesco. Already the people were begin-
ning to take a strong interest in what seemed to them a
short and easy method of argument (for those who were
to be convinced), when Savonarola, keenly alive to the
dangers that lay in the mere discussion of the case, com-
manded Fra Domenico to withdraw his acceptance of the
challenge and secede from the affair. The Franciscan
declared himself content: he had not directed his challenge
to any subaltern, but to Fra Girolamo himself.

After that the popular interest in the Lenten sermons
liad flagged a little. But this morning, when Tito entered
the Piazza di Santa Croce, he found, as he expected, that

EIPENIXG SCHEMES. 4^2

the people were pouring from the church in large numbers
Instead of dispersing, many of them concentrated Them-
selves toward a particular spot near the entrance of the

fw "1'''"^.^"^^'''/^^"^^ ^''^ *««^ ^^^ same direction
threading the crowd with a careless and leisurely air, but
keeping careful watch on that monastic entrance! as f he
expected some object of interest to issue from it
T)i "^f' r.f'''^ expectation that occupied the crowd
The object they were caring about was"^ already visible

Li . I? *q' '^^P' ^^ ^ ^""'Se placard, affixed by
order of the Signona^ and covered with Very legible
official handwriting But curiosity was somewhat balked
by the fact that the manuscript was chiefly in Latin

m.l v^'^'f ."If ^^,'''''^ ^'^^^ ^^^^^' beforehand approxi^
mately what the placard contained, he had an appetite
for more exact knowledge, which gave him an iiitat-
ing sense of his neighbor's ignorance in not being
able to interpret the learned tongue. For that aural
acquaintance with Latin phrases which the unlearned
might pick up from pulpit quotations constantly
interpreted by the preacher could help them little when
they saw written Latin; the spelling even of the modern
language being in an unorganized and scrambling condi-
tion for the mass of people who could read and write *
while the majority of those assembled nearest to the placard
iTtTle knV^l d ^ ^^^^^®^'o^s predicament of possessing that

'at's the Prate's doctrines that he's to prove by beiiiff
burned, said that large public character Gorb, whS
happened to be among the foremost gazers. "The Sio--
noria has taken it in hand, and the writing is to let us
know. It's what the Padre has been telling us about in
his sermon.'

■<ll^^^'^ Goro," said a sleek shopkeeper, compassionatelv,
-^thou hast got thy legs into twisted hose there. Tlie
i^ rate has to prove his doctrines by nof being burned: he is
to walk through the fire, and come out on the other side
sound and whole."

" Yes, yes," said a young sculptor, who wore his white-
streaked cap and tunic with a jauntv air. ''But Pra
(jirolamo objects to Avalking through the fire. Being
sound and whole already, he sees no reason why he should
walk through the fire to come out in just the same con-

nnonTllt^l'^ diarists throw in their consonants with a regard rather to

482 ROM OLA.

dition. He leaves such odds and ends of work to Fra
Domenico."

"Then I say he flinches like a coward," said Goro, in a
wheezy treble. "Suffocation! that was what he did at
the Carnival. He had us all in the Piazza to see the
lightning strike him, and nothing came of it."

" Stop that bleating," said a tall shoemaker, who had
stepped in to hear part of the sermon, with bunches of
slippers hanging over his shoulders. "It seems to me,
friend, that you are about as wise as a calf with water on
its brain. The Frate will flinch from nothing: he'll say
nothing beforehand, perhaps, but when the moment comes
he'll walk through the fire without asking any gray -frock
to keep him company. But I would give a shoestring to
know what this Latin all is."

" There's so much of it," said the shopkeeper, "else Fm
pretty good at guessing. Is there no scholar to be seen?"
he added, with a slight expression of disgust.

There are a general turning of heads, which caused the
talkers to descry Tito approaching in their rear.

"Here is one," said the young sculptor, smiling and
raising his cap.

"It is the secretary of the Ten: he is going to the con-
vent, doubtless; make way for him," said the shopkeeper,
also doffing, though that mark of respect was rarely shown
by Florentines excejit to the highest officials. The excc])-
tional reverence was really exacted by the splendor and
grace of Tito's appearance, which made his black mantle,
with its gold fibula, look like a regal robe, and his ordinary
black velvet cap like an entirely exceptional head-dress.
The hardening of his cheeks and mouth, which was the
chief change in his face since he came to Florence, seemed
to a superficial glance only to give his beauty a more
masculine character. He raised his own cap immediately
and said —

" Thanks, my friend, I merely wished, as you did, to see
what is at the foot of this placard — ah, it is as I expected.
T had been informed that the government permits any one
who will, to subscribe his name as a candidate to enter the
fire — which is an act of liberality worthy of the magnificent
Sigiioria — reserving of course the right to make a selec-
tion. And doubtless many believers will be eager to sub-
scribe their names. For what is it to enter the fire, to one
whose faitli is firm? A man is afraid of the fire, because
he believes it will burn liim; but if he believes the con-

KIPEXING SCHEMES. 4y3

trary?"— here Tito lifted his shoulders and made an ora-
torical pause—- for which reason I have never been one to
disbelieve the Frate, when he said that he would enter the
fire t<) prove his doctrine. For in his place, if you believed
the fire would not burn you, which of vou, my friends
wou d not enter It as readily as you would walk alouff the
dry bed of the Mugnone?" "

As Tito looked round him during this appeal, there
was a change m some of his audience very much like the
change m an eager dog when he is invited to smell some-
thing pungent. Since the question of burning was becom-
ing practical, it was not every one who would rashly com-
mit himself to any general view of the relation between
taith and fire. The scene might have been too much for
a gravity less under command than Tito's.

/'Then, Messer Segretario," said the young sculptor
''it seems to me Fra Francesco is the greater hero for he
offers to enter the fire for the truth, though he is sure the
fire will burn him."

" I do not deny it,'' said Tito, blandly. " But if it turns
out that Fra Francesco is mistaken, he will have been
burned for the wrong side, and the Church has never
reckoned such victims to be martyrs. We must suspend
our judgment until the trial has really taken place."

"It IS true, Messer Segretario," said the shopkeeper,
with subdued impatience. "But will you favor us by
interpreting the Latin ?"

"Assuredly," said Tito, "It does not express the con-
clusions or doctrines which the Frate specially teaches,
and which the trial by fire is to prove true or false. They

are doubtless familiar to you. First, that Florence "

"Let us have the Latin bit by bit, and then tell us
what it means," said the shoemaker, who had been a fre-
quent hearer of Fra Girolamo.

"Willingly," said Tito, smiling. " You will then judge
if I give you the right meaning."
"Yes, yes; that's fair," said Goro.
'' Ecclesia Dei indiget,remvatione; that is the Church
of God needs purifying or regeneration."
"It is true," said several voices at once.
"That means, the priests ought to lead better lives;
there needs no miracle to prove that. That's what the
Frate has always been saying," said the shoemaker.

" FlageUc'/nfur/' Tito went on. "That is, it will be
scourged. Renovabitur: it will be purified. Florentia

484 ROMOLA.

quoque post flageUam renovabitur et prosperaMtur: Flor-
ence, also, after the scourging, shall be purified and shall
prosper. "

"That means we are to get Pisa again," said the shop-
keeper.

" And get the wool from England as we used to do, I
should hope," said an elderly man, in an old-fashioned
berretta, who had been silent till now. " There's been
scourging enough with the sinking of the trade."

At this moment, a tall personage, surmounted by a red
feather, issued from the door of the convent, and exchanged
an indifferent glance with Tito, who, tossing his becchetto
carelessly over his left shoulder, turned to his reading
again, while the bystanders, with more timidity than
respect, shrank to make a passage for Messer Dolfo Spini.

"■ Infideles convertentur ad Christum," Tito went on.
"That is, the infidels shall be converted to Christ."

"Those are the Turks and the Moors. AVell, Fve
nothing to say against that," said the shopkeeper, dispas-
sionately.

" H(Bc autem omnia erunt temporihus nostris: and all
these things shall haj)pen in our times."

" Why, what use would they be else?" said Goro.

^' Excommiinicatio nuper lata contra Reverendum Patrem
nostrum Fratrem Hieronymum nulla est: the excommuni-
cation lately pronounced against our reverend father, Fra
Girolamo, is null. No7i ohservantes earn non peccant:
those who disregard it are not committing a sin."

"I shall know better what to say to that when we have
had the Trial by Fire," said the shopkeeper.

"Which doubtless will clear up everything," said Tito.
"That is all the Latin — all the conclusions that are to be
proved true or false by the trial. The rest you can per-
ceive is simply a proclamation of the Signoria in good
Tuscan, calling on such as are eager to walk through the
fire, to come to the Palazzo and subscribe their names.
Can I serve you further? If not "

Tito, as he turned away, raised his cap and bent slightly,
with so easy an air that the movement seemed a natural
prompting of deference.

He quickened his pace as he left the Piazza, and after
two or three turnings he paused in a quiet street before a
door at which he gave a light and ]ieculiar knock. It
was ()])eped by a .young woman whom lie clnu-ked under
the chin us he asked her if the Padrone was within, and

RIPENING SCHEMES. 485

he then passed, without further coremoiiv, through another
door which stood ajar on his right hand." It admitted him
mtoa handsome but untidy room, where Dolfo 8pini sat
pLaying with a fine stag-hound which altcrnatolv snuffed at
a basket of pups and licked his liands with that jitfectionate
disregard of lier master's morals sometimes held to be one
of the most agreeable attributes of her sex. He just looked
up as Tito entered, but continued his plav, simply from
that disposition to persistence in some irrelevant action, by
which slow-witted sensual people seem to be continually
counteracting their own purposes. Tito was patient.

"A handsome hracca that/' he said, quietly, standing
with his thumbs in his belt. Presently he added, in that
cool liquid tone which seemed mild, but compelled atten-
tion, ''When you have finished such caresses as cannot
possibly be deferred, my Dolfo, we will talk of business, if
you please. My time, which I could wish to be eternity
at your service, is not entirely my own this morning."

"Down, Mischief, down!" said Spini, with sudden
roughness. "Malediction!" he added, still more gruffly,
pushing the dog aside; then, starting from his seat, he
stood close to Tito, and put a hand on his shoulder as he
spoke.

"I hope your sharp wits see all the ins and outs of this
business, my fine necromancer, for it seems to me no clearer
than the bottom of a sack."

"What is your difficulty, my cavalier?"
" These accursed Frati Minori at Santa Croce. They
are drawing back now. Fra Francesco himself seems afraid
of sticking to his challenge; talks of the Prophet being
likely to use magic to get up a false miracle — thinks he
himself might be dragged into the fire and burned, and
the Prophet might come out whole by magic, and the
Church be none the better. And then, after all our talk-
ing, there's not so much as a blessed lay brother who will
offer himself to pair with that pious sheep Fra Domenico."
"It is the peculiar stupidity of the tonsured skull that
prevents them from seeing how little consequence it is
whether they are burned or not," said Tito. " Have you
sworn w^ell to them that they shall be in no danger of
entering the fire ? "

"No," said Spini, looking puzzled; "because one of
them will be obliged to go in with Fra Domenico, who
thinks it a thousand years till the fagots are ready."
"Not at all. Fra Domenico himself is nut likelv to go

486 ROMOLA.

in. I have told you before, my Dolfo, only your powerful
mind is not to be impressed without more repetition than
suffices for the vulgar — I have told you that now you have
got the Siguoria to take up this affair and prevent it from
being huslied up by Fra Girolamo, nothing is necessary
but that on a given day the fuel shall be prepared in the
Piazza, and the people got together with the expectation
of seeing something prodigious. If, after that, the Prophet
quits the Piazza without any appearance of a miracle on
his side, he is ruined with the people: they will be ready
to pelt him out of the city, the Signoria will find it easy to
banish him from the territory, and his Holiness may do as
he likes with him. Therefore, my Alcibiades, swear to
the Franciscans that their gray frocks shall not come
within singeing distance of the fire.''

Spini rubbed the back of his head with one hand, and
tapped his sword against his leg with the other, to stimu-
late his power of seeing these intangible combinations.

" But," he said presently, looking up again, " unless we
fall on him m the Piazza, when the people are in a rage,
and make an end of him and his lies then and there, Val-
ori and the Salviati and the Albizzi will take up arms and
raise a fight for him. I know that was talked of when
there was the hubbub on Ascension Sunday. And the
people may turn round again: there may be a story raised
of the French king coming again, or some other cursed
chance in the hypocrite's favor. The city will never be
safe till he's out of it."

''He will be out of it before long, without your giving
yourself any further trouble than this little comedy of the
Trial by Fire. The wine and the sun will make vinegar
without any shouting to help them, as your Florentine
sages would say. You will have the satisfaction of deliver-
ing your city from an incubus by an able stratagem, instead
of risking blunders with sword-thrusts."

" But suppose he did get magic and the devil to help
him, and walk through the fire after all?" said Spini, with
a grimace intended to hide a certain shyness in trenching
on this speculative ground. "How do you know there's
nothing in those things? Plenty of scholars believe in
them, and this Frate is bad enough for anything."

"Oh, of course there are such things," said Tito, with a
shrug: "but I have particular reasons for knowing that
the Frate is not on such terms with the devil as can give

RIPENING SCHEMES. 487

him any confidence in this affair. The only magic lie
relies on is his own ability."

"Ability!" said Spini. ''Do you call it ability to be
setting Florence at loggerheads with the Pope and all the
powers of Italy — all to keep beckoning at the French king
who never comes? You may call him able, but I call him
a hypocrite who wants to be master of everybody, and get
himself made Pope."

"You judge with your usual penetration, my captain,
but our opinions do not clash. The Frate, wanting to be
master, and to carry out his projects against the Pope,
requires the lever of a foreign power, and requires Florence
as a fulcrum, I used to think him a narrow-minded bigot,
but now I think him a shrewd, ambitious man, who knows
what he is aiming at, and directs his aim as skillfully as
you direct a ball when you are playing at maglio."

" Yes, yes," said Spini, cordially, " I can aim a ball."

" It is true," said Tito, with bland gravity; " and I
should not have troubled you with my trivial remark on
the Frate's ability, but that you may see how this will
heighten the credit of your success against him at Rome
and at Milan, which is sure to serve you in good stead
when the city comes to change its policy."

"Well, thou art a good little demon, and shalt have
good pay," said Spini, patronizingly; whereupon he thought
it only natural that the useful Greek adventurer should
smile with gratification as he said —

" Of course, any advantage to me depends entirely on
your "

" We shall have our supper at my palace to-night,"
interrupted Spini, with a significant nod and an affection-
ate pat on Tito's shoulder, "and I shall expound the new
scheme to them all."

"Pardon, my magnificent patron," said Tito; "the
scheme has been the same from the first — it has never
varied except in your memory. Are you sure you have
fast hold of it now?"

Spini rehearsed.

"One thing more," he said, as Tito was hastening away.
"There is that sharp-nosed notary, Ser Ceccone; he has
been handy of late. Tell me, you who can see a man wink
when you're behind him, do you think I may go on making
use of him?"

Tito dared not say "No." He knew his companion too

488 KOMOLA.

well to trust him with advice when all Spini's vanity and
self-interest were not engaged in concealing the adviser.

" Doubtless/' he answered, i^romptly. "1 have nothing
to say against Ceccone.''

That suggestion of the notary's intimate access to Spini
caused Tito a passing twinge, interrupting his amused
satisfaction in the success with which he made a tool of
the man who fancied himself a patron. For he had been
rather afraid of Ser Ceccone. Tito's nature made him
peculiarly alive to circumstances that might be turned to
his disadvantage; his memory was much haunted by such
possibilities, stimulating him to contrivances by which he
might ward them off. And it Avas not likely that he should
forget that October morning more than a year ago, when
Romola had appeared suddenly before him at the door of
Nellp's shop, and had compelled him to declare his cer-
tainty that Fra Girolamo was not going outside the gates.
The fact that Ser Ceccone had been a witness of that scene,
together with Tito's perception that for some reason or
other he was an object of dislike to the notary, had received
a new importance from the recent tiirn of events. For
after having been implicated in the Medicean plots, and
having found it advisable in consequence to retire into the
country for some time, Ser Ceccone had of late, since his
reappearance in the city, attached himself to the Arrab-
biati, and cultivated the patronage of Dolfo Spini. Xow
that captain of the Compagnacci was much given, when in
the company of intimates, to confidential narrative about
his own doings, and if Ser Cecconc's powers of combina-
tion were sharpened by enmity, he might gather some
knowledge which he could use against Tito with very
unpleasant results.

It would be pitiable to be balked in well-conducted
schemes by an insignificant notary; to be lamed by the
sting of an insect whom he had offended unawares.
"But," Tito said to himself, "the man's dislike to me
can be nothing deeper tlian the ill-humor of a dinnerless
dog; I shall conquer it if I can make him prosperous.".
And he had been very glad of an opportunity which had
presented itself of providing the notary with a temporary
post as an extra cancelliere or I'egistering secretary under
the Ten, believing that with this sop and the expectation
of more, the waspish cur must be quite cured of' the dis-
position to bite him.

But perfect scheming demands omniscience, and the

^TVENING SCHEMES. 4y9

notary's envy had been stimulated into liatreu \jj _.,„^
of which Tito kneAv nothing. That evening when Tito^
returning from his critical audience with the Special
Council, had brushed by Ser Ceccone on the stairs, the
notary, who had only just returned from Pistoja, and
learned the arrest of the conspirators, was bound on an
errand which bore a humble resemblance to Tito's. He
also, without giving up a show of popular zeal, had been
putting in the Medicean lottery. He also had been privy
to the unexecuted plot, and was willing to tell what he
knew, but knew much less to tell. He also would have
been willing to go on treacherous errands, but a more
eligible agent had forestalled him. His propositions were
received coldly; the council, he was told, was already in
possession of the needed information, and since he had been
thus busy in sedition, it would be well for him to retire out
of the way of mischief, otherwise the government might
be obliged to take note of him. Ser Ceccone wanted no
evidence to make him attribute his failure to Tito, and his
spite was the more bitter because the nature of the case
compelled him to hold his peace about it. Nor was this
the whole of his grudge against the flourishing Melema.
On issuing from his hiding-place, and attaching himself to
the Arrabbiati, he had earned some pay as oneof the spies
who reported information on Florentine affairs to the
Milanese court; but his pay had been small, notwithstand.-
ing his pains to write full "letters, and he had lately been
apprised that his news was seldom more than a late and
imperfect edition of what was known already. Now Ser
Ceccone had no positive knowledge that Tito had an under-
hand connection with the Arnibbiati and the Court of
Milan, but he had a suspicion of which he chewed the cud
with as strong a sense of flavor as if it had been a certainty.

This fine-grown vigorous hatred could swallow the feeble
opiate of Tito's favors, and be as lively as ever after it.
Why should Ser Ceccone like Melema any the better for
doing him favors? Doubtless the suave secretary had his
own ends to serve; and what right had he to the" superior
position Mdiich made it possible for him to show favor?
But since he had turned his voice to flattery, Ser Ceccone
would pitch his in the same key, and it remained to be seen
who would win at the game of outwitting.

To have a mind well oiled with that sort of argument
which prevents any claim from grasping it, seems eminently
convenient sometimes; only the oil becomes objectionable

490 KUMOLA.

when w^ ^'^'^ ^^ anointing other minds on which we want
LO establish a hold.

Tito, however, not being quite omniscient, felt now no
more than a passing twinge of uneasiness at the suggestion
of Ser Ceccone's power to hurt him. It was only for a
little Avhile that he cared greatly about keeping clear of
suspicions and hostility. He was now playing his final
game in Florence, and, the skill he was conscious of apply-
ing gave him a pleasure in it even apart from the expected
winnings. The errand on which he was bent to San Marco
was a stroke in which he felt so much confidence,
that he had already given notice to the Ten of his desire
to resign his office at an indefinite period within the next
month or two, and had obtained permission to make that
resignation suddenly, if his affairs needed it, with the
understanding that Xiccolo Macchiavelli was to be his pro-
visional substitute, if not his successor. He was acting on
hypothetic grounds, but this Avas the sort of action that
had the keenest interest for his diplomatic mind. From
a combination of general knowledge concerning Savona-
rola's purposes with diligently observed details he had
framed a conjecture which he "was about to verify by this
visit to San Marco. H he proved to be right, his game
would be won, and he might soon turn his back on Flor-
ence. He looked eagerly toward that consummation, for
many circumstances besides his own weariness of the place
told him that it was time for him to be gone.

CHAPTER LXIV.

THE PROPHET IN HIS CELL.

Tito's visit to San Marco had been announced before-
lumd, and he was at once conducted by Fra Niccolo, Savon-
arola's secretary, up the spiral staircase into the long
corridors lined with cells — corridors where Fra Angelico's
frescoes, delicate as the rainbow on the melting cloud,
startled the unaccustomed eye here and there, as if they
had been sudden refiections cast from an ethereal world,
where the Madonna sat crowned in her radiant glory, and ,
the Divine infant looked forth witli i)erpetual promise.

It was an hour of relaxation in the monastery, and most

THE PROPHET I.\ HIS (ELL. 491

Of the cells were empty. Tl.e liglit through the narrow
wjndows looked m on nothing but bare walls, and the
hard pallet and the crucifix. And even behind that door
at the end of a long corridor, in the inner cell opening
from an antechamber where the Prior usually sat at hii
desk or received private visitors, the high jet of liaht fell
on only one more object that looked quite as cSmmon
a monastic sight as the bare walls and hard pallet It
was but the back of a figure in the long wliite Dominican
tunic and scapulary, kneeling with bowed head before a
crucifax It miglit have been any ordinarv Fra Girolamo,
who had nothing worse to confess than thinking of wron*^
things when he was singing in coro, or feeling a spiteful
jov when Fra Benedetto dropped the ink over his own
miniatures m the breviary he was illuminating — who had
no higher thought than that of climbing safely into Para-
dise up the narrow ladder of praver, fasting, and obedi-
ence. But under this particular white tunic there was a
heart beating with a consciousness inconceivable to the
average monk, and perhaps hard to be conceived by any
man who has not arrived at self-knowledge throuoh a
tumultuous inner life: a consciousness in which irrevoca-
ble errors and lapses from veracity were so entwined with
noble purposes and sincere beliefs, in which self-justif vino-
expediency was so inwoven with the tissue of a great work
which the whole being seemed as unable to abandon as the
body was unable to abandon dowing and tremblino- before
the objects of hope and fear,'' that it was perhaps fmpossi-
ble, whatever course might be adopted, for the conscience
to find perfect repose.

Savonarola was not only in the attitude of prayer,
there were Latin words of prayer on his lips; and vet he
was not praying. He had entered his cell, had fallen on
his knees, and burst into words of supplication, seeking
in this way for an influx of calmness wliich would be a
warrant to him that the resolutions urged on him by
crowding thoughts and passions were not wresting him
away from the Divine support; but the previsions and
impulses which had been at work within him for the last
hour were too imperious; and while he pressed his hands
against his face, and while his lips were utterino; audiblv,
"Cor mundum area in me," his mind was still tilled with
the images of the snare his enemies had prepared for him,
was still busy with the arguments by which he could
justify himself against their taunts and accusations.

492 komoLa.

And it was not only against his opponents that Savoua-
roLx had to defend himself. This morning he had had
new proof that liis friends and followers ^vere as mnch
inclined to urge on tlie Trial hv Fire as his enemies: desir-
ing and tacit ]y ex])ecting that he himself \vould at last
accept the challenge and evoke the long-exjoected miracle
which was to dissipate doubt and triumph over malignity.
Had he not said that God would declare himself at the
fitting time? And to the understanding of plain Floren-
tines, eager to get party questions settled, it seemed that
no time could be more fitting than this. Certainly, if
Fra Domenico walked through the fire unhurt, that would
be a miracle, and the faith and ardor of that good brother
Avere felt to be a cheering augury: but Savonarola was
acutely conscious that the secret longing of his folloAvers
to see him accept the challenge had not been dissipated by
any reasons he had given for his refusal.

Yet it was impossible to him to satisfy them; and with
bitter distress he saw now that it was impossible for him
any longer to resist the prosecution of the trial in Fra Dom-
enico's case. Not that Savonarola had uttered and written
a falsity when he declared his belief in a future supernatural
attestation of his work: but his mind was so constituted
that, while it was easy for him to believe in a miracle,
which, being distant and undefined, was screened behind
the strong reasons he saw for its occurrence, and yet easier
for him to have a belief in inward miracles such as his own
prophetic inspiration and divinely-wrought intuitions; it
was at the same time insurmountably ditficult to him to
believe in the probability of a miracle which, like this of
being carried unhurt through the fire, pressed in all its
details on his imagination and involved a demand not only
for belief but for exceptional action.

Savonarola's nature was one of those in which opposing
tendencies coexist in almost equal strength: the passionate
sensibility which, impatient of definite thonght, floods
every idea with emotion and tends toward contemplative
ecstacy, alternated in him with a keen perception of out-
ward facts and a vigorous practical judgment of men and
things. And in this case of the Trial by Fire, the latter
characteristics were stimulated into unusual activity by an
acute physical sensitiveness which gives overpowering force
to the conception of pain and destruction as a necessary
sequence of facts which have already been causes of pain
in our experience. The promptitude with which men will

THE PKOPHET IN HIS CELL. 403

consent to touch red-hot iron with a wet finger is not to be
measured by their theoretic acceptance of the impossibility
that the iron will burn them: practiciil belief depends on
what is most strongly represented in the mind at a given
moment. And with the Frate's constitution, when the
Trial by Fire was urged on his imagination as an immedi-
ate demand, it was impossible for him to believe that he or
any other man could walk through the flames unhurt —
impossible for him to believe that even if he resolved to
offer himself, he would not shrink at the last moment.

But the Florentines were not likely to make these fine
distinctions. To the common run of mankind it has always
seemed a proof of mental vigor to find moral questions
easy, and judge conduct according to concise alternatives.
And nothing was likely to seem plainer than that a man
who at one time declared that God would not leave him
without the guarantee of a miracle, and yet drew back
when it was proposed to test his declaration, had said what
he did not believe. Were not Fra Domenico and Fra Mari-
ano, and scores of Piagnoni besides, ready to enter the
fire? What was the cause of their superior courage, if it
was not their superior faith? Savonarola could not have
explained his conduct satisfactorily to his friends, even if
he had been able to explain it thoroughly to himself. And
he was not. Our naked feelings make haste to clothe them-
selves in propositions which lie at hand among our store
of opinions, and to give a true account of what passes
within us something else is necessary besides sincerity, even
when sincerity is unmixed. In these very moments, when
Savonarola was kneeling in audible prayer, he had ceased
to hear the words on his lips. They were drowned by argu-
mentative voices within him that shaped their reasons
more and more for an outward audience.

" To appeal to heaven for a miracle by a rash acceptance
of a challenge, which is a mere snare prepared for me by
ignoble foes, would be a tempting of God, and the appeal
would not be responded to. Let the Pope's legate come,
let the ambassadors of all the great powders come and jn-om-
ise that the calling of a General Council and the reform of
the Church shall hang on the miracle, and I will enter the
flames, trusting that God will not withhold His seal from
that great work. Until then I reserve myself for higher
duties which are directly laid upon me: it is not permitted
to me to leap from the chariot for the sake of wrestling with
every loud vaunter. But Fra Domenico's invincible zeal to

494: KOMOLA.

enter into the trial may be the sign of a Divine vocation,
may be a pledge that the miracle "

But no! when Savonarola brought his mind close to the
threatened scene in the Piazza, and imagined a human
body entering the fire, his belief recoiled again. It was
not an event that his imagination could simply see: he felt
it with shuddering vibrations to the extremities of his sensi-
tive fingers. The miracle could not be. Nay, the trial itself
was not to happen: he was warranted in doing all in his
power to hinder it. The fuel might be got ready in the
Piazza, the people might be assembled, the preparatory
formalities might be gone through: all this was perhaps
inevitable now, and he could no longer resist it without
bringing dishonor on — himself? Yes, and therefore on
the cause of God. But it was not really intended that the
Franciscan should enter the fire, and while lie hung back
there would be the means of preventing Fra Domeuico's
entrance. At the very worst, if Fra Domenico were com-
pelled to enter, he should carry the consecrated Host with
him, and with that Mystery in his hand, there might be a
Avarrant for expecting that the ordinary effects of fire
would be stayed; or, more probably, this demand would
be resisted, and might thus be a final obstacle to the trial.

But these intentions could not be avowed: he must
appear frankly to await the trial, and to trust in its issue.
That dissidence between inward reality and outward seem-
ing was not the Christian simplicity after which he had
striven through years of his youth and prime, and which
he had preached as a chief fruit of the Divine life. In the
stress and heat of the day, with cheeks burning, Avith
shouts ringing in the ears, who is so blest as to remember
the yearnings he had in the cool and silent morning and
know that he has not belied them?

"■ 0 God, it is for the sake of the people — because they
are blind — because their faith depends on me. If I put on
sackcloth and cast myself among the ashes, who will take
up the standard and head the battle? Have I not been
led by a Avay which I knew not to the work that lies before
me?"

The conflict was one that could not end, and in the
effort at prayerful pleading the uneasy mind laved its smart
continually in thoughts of the greatness of that task which
there was no man else to fulfill if he forsook it. It was not
a thing of every day that a man should be inspired with
the vision and the daring that made a sacred rebel.

THE PROPHET IK HIS CELL. 495

Even the words of prayer hud died away. He continued
to kneel, but his mind was filled with the images of results
to be felt through all Europe; and the sense of immediate
difficulties was being lost in the glow of tliat vision, when
the knocking at the door announced the expected visit.

Savonarola drew on his mantle before he left his cell', as
was his custom when he received visitors; and with that
immediate response to any appeal from without which
belongs to a power-loving nature accustomed to make its
power felt by speech, he met Tito with a glance as self-
possessed and strong as if he had risen from resolution
instead of conflict.

Tito did not kneel, but simply made a greeting of pro-
found deference, which Savonarola received quietlv without
any sacerdotal words, and then desiring him to be seated,
said at once —

"Your business is something of weight, my son, that
could not be conveyed through others?''

''Assuredly, father, else I should not have presumed to
ask it. I will not trespass on your time by any proem. I
gathered from a remark of Messer Domenico Mazzinghi
that you might be glad to make use of the next special
courier who is sent to France with dispatches from the Ten.
I_ must entreat you to pardon me if I have been too offi-
cious; but inasmuch as Messer Domenico is at this moment
away at his villa, I wished to apprise you that a courier
carrying important letters is about to depart for Lyons at
daybreak to-morrow."

The muscles of Era Girolamo's face were eminently
under command, as must be the case with all men whose
personality is powerful, and in deliberate speech he was
habitually cautious, confiding his intentions to none witli-
out necessity. But under any strong mental stimulus, his
eyes were liable to a dilation and added brilliancy that no
strength of will could control. He looked steadily at Tito,
and did not answer immediately, as if he had to consider
whether the information he had just heard met any pur-
pose of his.

Tito, whose glance never seemed observant, but rarely
let anything escape it, had expected precisely that dilatation
and flash of Savonarola's eyes which he had noted on other
occasions. He saw it, and then immediately busied him-
self in adjusting his gold fibula, which had got wrong;
seeming to imply that he awaited an answer patiently.

The fact was that Savonarola had expected to receive

lU'; EOMOLA.

this intimation from Domenico Mazzinghi, one of the Ten,
an ardent discij)le of his whom he had already employed
to write a private letter to the Florentine ambassador in
France, to prepare the way for a letter to the French king
himself in Savonarola's handwriting, which now lay ready
in the desk at his side. It was a letter calling on the king
to assist in summoning a General Council, that might
reform the abuses of the Church, and begin by deposing
Pope Alexander, who was not rightfully Pope, being a
vicious unbeliever, elected by corruption and governing by
simony.

This fact was not what Tito knew, but what his con-
structive talent, guided by subtle indications, li^d led him
to guess and hope.

"It is true, my son," said Savonarola, quietly, "it is
true I have letters which I would gladly send by safe con-
veyance under cover to our ambassador. Our community
of San Marco, as you know, has affairs in France, being,
amongst other things, resjoonsible for a debt to that sin-
gularly wise and experienced Frenchman, Signer Philippe
de Comines, on the library of the Medici, which we pur-
chased; but I apprehend that Domenico Mezzinghi him-
self may return to tlie city before evening, and I should
gain more time for preparation of the letters if I waited to
deposit them in his hands."

"Assuredly, reverend father, that might be better on all
grounds, except one, namely, that if anything occurred to
hinder Messer Domenico's return, the dispatch of the
letters would require either that I should come to San
Marco again at a late hour, or that you should send them
to me l)y your secretary; and I am aware that you wish to
guard against the false inferences which might be drawn
from a too frequent communication between yourself and
any officer of the government." In throwing out this
difficulty Tito felt that the more unwillingness the Frate
showed to trust him, the more ceitain he would be of his
conjecture.

Savonarola was silent; but while he kept his mouth firm
a slight glow rose in his face with the suppressed excite-
ment that was growing within him. It would be a critical
moment — that in which he delivered the letter out of his
own hands.

"It is most probable that Messer Domenico will return
in time," said Tito, affecting to consider the Frate's deter-
mination settled, and rising from his chair as he spoke.

THE I'KOPHET IN HIS CELL. 497

'' With your permission, I will take my leave, father, not
to trespass on your time when my errand is done; but as I
iiiay not be favored with another interview, I venture to
confide to you — what is not yet known to others, except to
the Magnificent Ten — that I contemplate resigning my
secretaryship and leaving Florence shortly. Am I pre-
sumng too much on your interest in stating what relates
chie3y to myself? "

" Speak on, my son," said the Frate; " I desire to know
your prospects."

"I find, then, that I have mistaken my real vocation in
forsaking the career of pure letters, for which I was brought
up. T'le politics of Florence, father, are worthy to occupy
the greatest mind — to occupy yours — when a man is in a
position to execute his own ideas; but when, like me, he
can only hope to be the mere instrument of changing
schemes, he requires to be animated by the minor attach-
ments of a born Florentine; also, my wife's unhappy
alienation from a Florentine residence since the painful
events of August naturally in-fluences me. I wish to join
her."

Savonarola inclined his head approvingly.

''I intend, then, soon to leave Florence, to visit the chief
courts of Europe, and to widen my acquaintance with the
men of letters in the various universities. I shall go first
to the court of Hungary, where scholars are eminently
welcome; and I shall probably start in a week or ten days. I
have not concealed from you, father, that I am no religious
enthusiast; I have not my wife's ardor; but religious "
enthusiasm, as I conceive, is not necessary in order to
appreciate the grandeur and justice of your views con-
cerning the government of nations and the Church. And
if you condescend to intrust me with any commission that
will further the relations you wish to establish, I shall feel
honored. May I now take my leave?"

" Stay, my son. When you depart from Florence I will
send a letter to your wife, of whose spiritual welfare I
would fain be assured, for she left me in anger. As for
the letters to France, such as I have ready "

Savonarola rose and turned to his desk as he spoke. He
took from it a letter on which Tito could see, but not read,
an address in the Frate's own minute and exquisite hand-
writing, still to be seen covering the margins of his Bibles.
He took a large sheet of paper, enclosed the letter, and
sealed it.
33

498 ROMOLA.

''Pardon me^ father/' said Tito, before Savonarola had
time to speak, "unless it were your decided wish, I would
rather not incur the responsibility of carrying away tie
letter. Messer Domenico Mazzinghi will doubtless return,
or, if not, Fra Niccolo can convey it to me at the second
hour of the evening, when I shall place the other ais-
patches in the courier's haiids."

"At present, my son," said the Frate, waiving that
point, "1 wish you to address this packet to our ambassa-
dor in your own handwriting, which is preferable io my
secretary's. "

Tito sat down to write the address while the Frate stood
by him with folded arms, the glow mounting in hi? cheek,
and his lip at last quivering. Tito rose and was sbout to
move away, when Savonarola said abruptly — " Tale it, my
son. There is no use in waiting. It does not please me
that Fra Niccolo should have needless errands to the
Palazzo."

As Tito took the letter, Savonarola stood in suppressed
excitement that forbade further speech. There seems to
be a subtle emanation from passionate natures like his,
making their mental states tell immediately on others;
when they are absent-minded and inwardly excited there
is silence in the air.

Tito made a deep reverence and went out with the letter
under his mantle.

The letter was duly delivered to the courier and carried
out of Florence. But before that happened another mes-
senger, privately employed by Tito, had conveyed infor-
mation in cipher, which was carried by a series of relays
to armed agents of Ludovico Sforza, I)uke of Milan, on
the watch for the very purpose of intercepting dispatches
on the borders of the Milanese territory.

CHAPTER LXV.

THE TRIAL BY FIRE.

Little more than a week after, on the seventh of April,
the great Piazza della Signoria presented a stranger spec-
tacle even than the famous Bonfire of Vanities. And a
greater multitude had assembled to see it than had ever

THE TRIAL BY FIRE. 499

before tried to find place for themselves in the wide Piazza,
eren on the day of San Giovanni.

It was near midday, and since the early morning there
had been a gradual swarming of the people at every coign
of vantage or disadvantage offered by the facades and
roois of the houses, and such spaces of the pavement as
were free to the public. Men were seated on iron rods
that made a sharp angle with the rising wall, were clutch-
ing siim pillars with arms and legs, were astride on the
necks of the rough statuary that here and there sur-
mounted the entrances of the grander houses, were finding
a palm's-breadth of seat on a bit of architrave, and a
footing on the rough projections of the rustic stonework,
while they clutched the strong iron rings or staples driven
into the walls beside them.

For they were come to see a Miracle : cramped limbs
and abraded fiesh seemed slight inconveniences with that
prospect close at hand. It is the ordinary lot of mankind
to hear of miracles, and more or less to believe in them;
but now the Florentines were going to see one. At the
very least they would see half a miracle; for if the monk
did not come whole out of the fire, they would see him
enter it, and infer that he was burned in the middle.

There could be no reasonable doubt, it seemed, that the
fire would be kindled, and that the monks would enter it.
For there, before their eyes, was the long platform, eight
feet broad, and twenty yards long, with a grove of fuel
heaped up terribly, great branches of dry oak as a foun-
dation, crackling thorns above, and well-anointed tow and
rags, known to make fine flames in Florentine illumina-
tions. The platform began at the corner of the marble
terrace in front of the Old Palace, close to Marzocco, the
stone lion, whose aged visage looked frowningly along the
grove of fuel that stretched obliquely across the Piazza.

Besides that, there were three large bodies of armed
men: five hundred hired soldiers of the Signoria stationed
before the palace; five hundred Compagnacci under Dolfo
Spini, far off on the opposite side of the Piazza; and three
hundred armed citizens of another sort, under Marco Sal-
viati, Savonarola's friend, in front of Orgagna's Loggia,
where the Franciscans and Dominicans were to be placed
with their champions.

Here had been much expense of money and labor, and
high dignities were concerned. There could be no rea-
sonable doubt that something great was about to happen:'

500 ROM OLA.

and it would certainly be a great thing if the two monlfs
were simply burned, for in that case too God would hare
spoken, and said very plainly that Fra Girolamo was not
his prophet.

And there was not much longer to wait, for it was row
near midday. Half the monks were already at their post,
and that half of the loggia that lies toward the palace
was already filled with gray mantles; but the other half,
divided off by boards, was still cmjjty of everything
except a small altar. The Franciscans had entered and
taken their j^laces in silence. But now, at the other side
of the piazza was heard loud chanting from two hundred
voices, and there was general satisfaction, if not in the
chanting, at least in the evidence that the Dominicans
Avere come. That loud chanting repetition of the prayer,
"Let God arise; and let his enemies be scattered," was
unpleasantly suggestive to some impartial ears of a desire
to vaunt confidence and excite dismay; and so was the
flame-colored velvet cope in which Fra Domenico was
arrayed as he headed the procession, cross in hand, his
simple mind really exalted with faith, and with the genu-
ine intention to enter the flames for the glory of God and
Fra Girolamo. Behind him came Savonarola in the white
vestment of a priest, carrying in his hands a vessel con-
taining the consecrated Host. He, too, was chanting
loudly; he, too, looked firm and confident, and as all eyes
were turned eagerly on him, either in anxiety, curiosity,
or malignity, from the moment when he entered the
piazza till he mounted the steps of the loggia and depos-
ited the Sacrament on the altar, there was an intensifying
flash and energy in his countenance responding to that
scrutiny.

We are so made, almost all of us, that the false seeming
which we have thought of with painful shrinking when
beforehand in our solitude it has urged itself on us as a
necessity, will possess our muscles and move our lips as if
nothing but that were easy when once we have come under
the stimulus of expectant eyes and ears. And the strength
of that stimulus to Savonarola can hardly be measured by
the experience of ordinary lives. Perhaps no man has
ever had a mighty influence over his fellows without
having the innate need to dominate, and this need usually
becomes the more imperious in proportion as the compli-
cations of life make Self inseparable from a purjiose
' which is not selfish. In this way it came to pass that on

THE TRIAL BY FIRE. f)()l

the (lay of the Trial by Fire, the doiihlenes? whieli is the
pre.ssiiig temptation in every public career, whether of
priest, orator, or statesman, was more strongly defined in
Savonarola's conscionsness as the acting of a part, than at
any other period in his life. He was struggling not
against impending martyrdom, but against impending
rum.

Therefore he looked and acted as if he were thor-
oughly confident, when all the while foreboding was press-
ing, with leaden weight on his heart, not only because of
the probable issues of this trial, but because of another
event already past — an event which was spreading a
sunny satisfaction through the mind of a man who was
looking down at the passion-worn prophet from a window
of the Old Palace. It was a common turning-point toward
which those Avidely-sundered lives had been converging,
that two evenings ago the news had come that the Floren-
tine courier of the Ten had been arrested and robbed of
all his dispatches, so that Savonarola's letter was already
in the hands of the Duke of Milan, and would soon be in
the hands of the Pope, not only heightening rage, but
giving a new justification to extreme measures. There
was no malignity in Tito Melema's satisfaction: it was a
mild self-gratulation of a man who has won a game that
has employed h}-pothetic skill, not a game that has stirred
the muscles and heated the blood. Of course that bundle
of desires and contrivances called human nature, when
moulded into the form of a plain-featured Frate Predica-
tore, more or less of an impostor, could not be a pathetic
object to a brilliant-minded scholar who understood every-
thing. Yet this tonsured Girolamo with the high nose
and large under lip was an immensely clever Frate, mixing
with his absurd superstitions or fabrications very remark-
able notions about government: no babbler, but a man
who could keep his secrets, Tito had no more spite
against him than against Saint Dominic. On the con-
trary, Fra Girolamo's existence had been highly convenient
to Tito Melema, furnishing him with that round of the
ladder from which he was about to leap on to a new and
smooth footing very much to his heart's content. And
everything now was in forward preparation for that leap:
let one more sun rise and set, and Tito hoped to quit
Florence. He had been so industrious that he felt at full
leisure to amuse himself with to-day's comedy, which the

50^ ROMOLA.

thick-headed Dolfo Spini could never have brought about
but for him.

Not yet did. the loud chanting cease, but rather swelled
to a deafening roar, being taken up in all parts of the
Piazza by the Piagnoni, who carried their little red crosses
as a badge, and, most of them, chanted the prayer for the
confusion of God's enemies with the expectation of an
answer to be given through the medium of a more signal
personage than Fra Domenico. This good Frate in his
flame-colored cope was now kneeling before the little altar
on which the Sacrament was deposited, awaiting his sum-
mons.

On the Franciscan side of the Loggia there was no
chanting and no flame-color: only silence and grayness.
But there was this counterbalancing difference, that the
Franciscans had two champions: a certain Fra Giuliano
was to pair Avith Fra Domenico, while the original cham-
pion, Fra Francesco, confined his challenge to Savonarola.

" Surely," thought the men perched uneasily on the
rods and pillars, "'all must be ready now. This chanting
might stop, and we should see better when the Frati are
moving toward the platform."

But the Frati were not to be seen moving yet. Cale
Franciscan faces were looking uneasily over the boarding
at that flame-colored cope. It had an evil look and might
be enchanted, so that a false miracle would be wrought by
magic. Your monk may come whole out of the fire, and
yet it may be the work of the devil.

And now there was passing to and fro between the
Loggia and the marble terrace of the Palazzo, and the roar
of chanting became a little quieter, for every one at a dis-
tance was beginning to watch more eagerly. But it soon
appeared that the new movement was not a beginning, but
an obstacle to beginning. The dignified Florentines ap-
pointed to preside over this affair as moderators on each side,
went in and out of the palace, and there was much debate
with the Franciscans. But at last it was clear that Fra
Domenico, conspicuous in his flame-color, was being
fetched toward the Palace. R-obably the fire had already
been kindled — it was difficult to see at a distance — and the
miracle was going to begin.

Not at all. The flame-colored cope disappeared within
the Palace; then another Dominican was fetched away:
and for a long while everything went on as before — the
tiresome chanting, which was not miraculous, and Fra Gi-

THE TRIAL BY FIRE. 503

rolamo in his white vestment standing just in the same
place. But at last something happened; Fra Domenico
was seen coming out of the Palace again, and returning to
his brethren. He had changed all his clothes with a
brother monk, but he was guarded on each flank by a
Franciscan, lest coming into the vicinity of Savonarola he
should be enchanted again.

'■'Ah, then," thought the distant spectators, a little less
conscious of cramped limbs and hunger, "Fra Domenico
is not going to enter the fire. It is Fra Girolamo who offers
himself after all. We phall see him move presently, and if
he comes out of the flames we shall have a fine" view of
him!"

But Fra Girolamo did not move, except with the ordi-
nary action accompanying speech. The speech was bold and
firm, perhaps somewhat ironically remonstrant, like that
of Elijah to the priests of Baal, demanding the cessation
of these trivial delays. But speech is the most irritating
kind of argument for those who are out of hearing,
cramped in the limbs and empty in the stomacli. And
what need was there for speech? If the miracle did not
begin, it could be no one's fault but Fra Girolamo's, who
might put an end to all difficulties by offering himself now
the fire was ready, as he had been forward enough to do
when there was no fuel in sight.

More movement to and fro, more discussion; and the
afternoon seemed to be slipping away all the faster because
the clouds had gathered, and changed the light on every-
thing, and sent a chill through the spectators, hungry in
mind and body.

Noiu it was the crucifix which Fra Domenico wanted to
carry into the fire, and must not be allowed to profane in
that manner. After some little resistance Savonarola gave
way to this objection, and thus had the advantage of
making one more concession; but he immediately placed
in JFra Domenico's hands the vessel containing the conse-
crated Host. The idea that the presence of the sacred Mys-
tery might in the worst extremity avert the ordinary effects
of fire hovered in his mind as a possibility; but the issue on
which he counted was of a more positive kind. In taking
up the Host he said quietly, as if he were only doing what
had been presupposed from the first —

"Since they are not willing that you should enter with
the crucifix, my brother, enter simply with the Sacninient.*'

New horror in the Franciscans; new firmness in Savona-

504 ROMOLA.

rola. "It was impious presumption to carry tlie Sacra-
ment into the fire; if it were burned the scandal would be
great in the minds of the weak and ignorant.'' ''Not at
all: even if it were burned, the Accidents only would be
consumed, the Substance would remain." Here was a
question that might be argued till set of sun and remain
as elastic as ever; and no one could propose settling it by
proceeding to the trial, since it was essentially a prelimi-
nary question. It was only necessary that both sides should
remain firm — that the Franciscans should persist in not
permitting the Host to be carried into the fire, and that
Fra Domenico should persist in refusing to enter without it.

Meanwhile the clouds were getting darker, the air chiller.
Even the chanting was missed now it had given way to
inaudible argument; and the confused sounds of talk from
all points of the Piazza, showing that expectation was
everj'where relaxing, contributed to the irritating presenti-
ment that nothing decisive would be done. Here and there
a dropping shout was heard; then, more frequent shouts
in a rising scale of scorn.

"Light the fire and drive them in!" "Let us have a
smell of roast — we want our dinner!" "Come, Prophet,
let us know whether anything is to happen before the
twenty-four hours are over!" "Yes, yes, what's your last
vision?" "Oh, he's got a dozen in his inside; they're the
small change for a miracle!" "Ola, Frate, where are
yon? Never mind wasting the fuel!"

Still the same movement to and fro between the Loggia
and the Palace; still the same debate, slow and unintel-
ligible to the multitude as the colloquies of insects that
touch antennas to no other api)arent effect than that of
going and coming. But an interpretation was not long
wanting to unheard debates in which Fra Girolamo was
constantly a speaker: it was he who was hindering the
trial; everybody was appealing to him now, and he was
bunging back.

Soon the shouts ceased to be distinguishable, and were
lost in an uproar not simj)ly of voices, but of clashing
metal and trampling feet. The suggestions of the irritated
people had stimulated old impulses in Dolfo Spini and his
band of Compagnacci; it seemed an opportunity not to be
lost for putting an end to Florentine difficulties by getting
possession of the arch-hypocrite's person; and there was a
vigorous rush of the armed men toward the Loggia, thrust-
ing the people aside, or driving them on to the file of

THE TRIAL BY FIKE. 505

soldiery stationed in front of the Palace. At this move-
ment, everything was suspended both with monks and
embarrassed magistrates except the palpitating watch to
see what would come of the struggle.

But the Loggia was well guarded by the band under
the brave Salviati; the soldiers of the Signoria assisted
in the repulse; and the trampling and rushing were all
backward again toward the Tetto de Pisani, when the
blackness of the heavens seemed to intensify in this moment
of utter confusion; and the rain, which had already been
felt in scattered drops, began to fall with rapidly growing
violence, wetting the fuel, and running in streams off the
platform, wetting the weary hungry people to the skin,
and driving every man's disgust and rage inwards to fer-
ment there in the damp darkness.

Everybody knew^ now that the Trial by Fire was not to
happen. The Signoria was doubtless glad of the rain, as
an obvious reason better than any pretext, for declaring
that both parties might go home. It was the issue which
Savonarola had expected and desired; yet it would be an
ill description of what he felt to say that he w^as glad. As
that rain fell, and plashed on the edge of the Loggia, and
sent spray over the altar and all garments and faces, the
Frate knew that the demand for him to enter the fire was
at an end. But he knew too, with a certainty as irresist-
ible as the damp chill that had taken possession of his
frame, that the design of his enemies was fulfilled, and that
his honor was not saved. He knew that he should have to
make his way to San Marco again through the enraged
crowd, and that the hearts of many friends who would
once have defended him with their lives would now be
turned against him.

When the rain had ceased he asked for a guard from the
Signoria, and it was given him. Had lie said that he was
willing to die for the work of his life? Yes, and he had
not spoken falsely. But to die in dishonor — held up to
scorn as a hypocrite and a false prophet? " 0 God! that
is not martyrdom! It is the blotting out of a life that has
been a protest against wrong. Let me die because of the
worth that is in me, not because of my weakness."

" The rain had ceased, and the light from the breaking
clouds fell on Savonarola as he left the Loggia in the
midst of his guard, walking as he had come, witli the
Sacrament in his hand. But there seemed no glory in
the light that fell on him now, no smile of heaven; it was

506

RO-MOLA.

only that light which shines on, patiently and impartially,

justifying 01- condemning by simjjly showing all things m
the slow history of their ripening. He heard no blessing,
no tones of pity, but only taunts and threats. He knew
this was a foretaste of coming bitterness; yet his courage
mounted under all moral attack, and he showed no sign
of dismay.

"'Well parried, Frate!" said Tito, as Savonarola de-
scended the steps of the Loggia. "But I fear your career
at Florence is ended. What say you, my Xiccolo?''

'' It is a pity his falsehoods were not all of a wise sort,"
said Macchiavelli, with a melancholy shrug. *'With the
times so much on his side as they are^about Church affairs,
he might have done something great."

CHAPTER LXVI.

A MASK OF THE FURIES.

The next day was Palm Sunday, or Olive Sunday, as it
was chiefly called in the olive-growing Vuldarno; and the
morning sun shone with a more delicious clearness for the
yesterday's rain. Once more Savonarola mounted the pul-
pit in San Marco, and saw a flock around him Avliose faith
in him was still unshaken; and this morning in calm and
sad sincerity he declared himself ready to die: in front of
all visions he saw his own doom. Once more he uttered
the benediction, and saw the faces of men and women
lifted toward him in venerating love. Then he descended
the steps of the pulpit and turned away from that sight
forever.

For before the sun had set Florence was in an uproar.
The passions Avhich had been roused the day before had
been smouldering through that quiet morning, and had now
burst out again with a fury not unassisted by design, and
not without official connivance. The uproar had ])egun at
the Duomo in an attempt of some Compagnacci to hinder
the evening sermon, which the Piagnoni had assembled to
hear. But no sooner had men's blood mounted and the
disturbances had become an atfray than the cry arose, " To
San Marco I the fire to San Marco!"

And long before the daylight had died, both the church

A MASK OF TirE FURIES. 507

and convent were ])eing besiesred bv an em-aged and con-
thuially increasing multitude: Not withon't resistance.
I' or the monks, long conscious of growing hostility without,
!iad arms within their walls, and some of them 'fought as
vigorously m their long white tunics as if they had' been
ivnights Templars. .Even the command of Savonarola
■•ould not prevail against the impulse to self-defense in
arms that were still muscular under the Dominican serge.
There were laymen too who had not chosen to depart, and
some of them fought fiercely: there was firing from the
high altar close by the great crucifix, there was pouring of
stones and hot embers from the convent roof, there Avas
close fighting with swords in the cloisters. Xotwithstand-
ing the force of the assailants, the attack lasted till deep
night.

The demonstrations of the Government had all been
against the convent; early in the attack guards had been
sent for, not to disperse the assailants, but to command
all within the convent to lay down their arms, all lavmen
to depart from it, and Savonarola himself to quit the Flor-
entine territory within twelve hours. Had Savonarola
quitted the convent then, he could hardly have escaped
being torn to pieces; he was willing to go, but his friends
hindered him. It was felt to be a great risk even for some
laymen of high name to depart by the garden wall, but
amon^ those who had chosen to*^ do so was Francesco
Valori, who hoped to raise rescue from without.

And now when it was deep night — when the struggle
could hardly have lasted much longer, and the ComfDao-
nacci might soon have carried their sVords into the library,
vvhere Savonarola was praying with the Brethren who had
either not taken up arms or had laid them down at his
command — there came a second body of guards, commis-
sioned by the Signoria to demand 'the persons of Fra
Girolamo and his two coadjutors, Fra Domenico and Fra
Salvestro.

Loud was the roar of triumphant hate when the light of
lanterns showed the Frate issuing from the door of the
convent with a guard who promised him no other safety
than that of the prison. The struggle now was, who should
get first in the stream that rushed up the narrow street to
see the Prophet carried back in ignominy to the Piazza
where he had braved it yesterday — Avho should be in the
best place for reaching hi? ear with insult, nay, if possible,
for smiting him and kicking him. This was not difficult

508 ROMOLA.

for some of the armed Compagnacci who were not pre-
vented from mixing themselves with the guards.

When Savonarohi felt himself dragged and pushed along
in the midst of that hooting multitude; when lanterns were
lifted to show him deriding faces; when he felt himself
spit upon, smitten and kicked with grossest words of
insult, it seemed to him that the worst bitterness of life
was past. If men judged him guilty, and were bent on
having his blood, it was only death that awaited him. But
the worst drop of bitterness can never be wrung on to our
lips from without; the lowest depth of resignation is not
to be found in martyrdom; it is only to be found when we
have covered our heads in silence and felt, " I am not
worthy to be a martyr; the Truth shall prosper, but not
by me."

But that brief imperfect triumph of insulting the Frate,
who had soon disappeared under the doorway of the Old
Palace, was only like the taste of blood to the tiger. "Were
there not the houses of the hypocrite's friends to be sacked?
Already one half of the armed multitude, too much in the
rear to share greatly in the siege of the convent, had been
employed in the more profitable work of attacking rich
houses, not with planless desire for plunder, but with that
discriminating selection of such as belonged to chief Piag-
noni, which showed that the riot was under guidance, and
that the rabble with clubs and staves was well officered by
sword-girt Compagnacci. Was there not — next criminal
after the Frate — the ambitious Francesco Yalori, suspected
of wanting with the Frate's hell) to make himself a Doge
or Gonfaloniere for life? And the gray-haired man who,
eight months ago. had lifted his arm and his voice in such
ferocious demand for justice on five of his fellow-citizens,
only escaped from San Marco to experience what others
called justice — to see his house surrounded by an angry,
greedy multitude, to see his wife shot dead 'w'ith an arrow,
and to be himself murdered, as he Avas on his way to answer
a summons to the Palazzo, by the swords of men named
Ridolfi and Tornabuoni.

In this way that Mask of the Furies, called Riot, was
played on in Florence through the hours of night and early
morning.

But the chief director was not visible: he had his rea-
sons for issuing his orders from a private retreat, being of
rather too high a name to let his red feather be seen waving
amongst all the work that was to be done before the dawn.

A MASK OF THE FURIES. 509

The retreat was the same house and the same room in a
quiet street between Santa Croce and San Marco, where
we have seen Tito paying a secret visit to Dolfo Spiui
Here the Captain of the Compagnacci sat through this
memorable night, receiving visitors who came and went
and went and came, some of them in the guise of armed
Compagnacci, others dressed obscnrelvand witliout visible
arms. There was abundant wine on the table, with drink-
mg-cups for chance comers; and though Spini was on his
guard against excessive drinking, he^took enough from
time to time to heighten the exci'tement produced by the
news that was being brought to him continually.

Among the obscurelj^-dressed visitors Ser Ceccone was
one of the most frequent, and as the hours advanced
toward the morning twilight he had remained as Spiui's
constant companion, together vrith Francesco Cei, who was
then in rather careless hiding in Florence, expecting to
have his banishment revoked when the Frate's fall had
been accomplislied.

The tapers had burned themselves into low shapeless
masses, and holes in the shutters were just marked by a
sombre outward light, when Spini, who had started from
his seat and walked up and down with an angry flush on
his face at some talk that had been going forward with
those two unmilitary companions, burst forth —

" The devil spit on him I he shall pav for it though. Ha,
ha I the claws shall be down on him when he little thinks
of them. So he was to be the great man after all I He's
been pretending to chuck everything toward mv cap, as if
I were a blind beggarman, and all the while" he's been
winking and filling his own scarsella. I should like to hang
skins about him and set my hounds on him ! And he's got
that fine ruby of mine, I was fool enough to give him yes-
terday. Malediction I And he was laughing at me in his
sleeve two years ago, and spoiling the best plan that ever
was laid. I was a fool for trusting myself with a rascal
who had long-twisted contrivances that nobody could see
to the end of but himself."

"A Greek, too, who dropped into Florence with gems
packed about him," said Francesco Cei, who had a slight
smile of amusement on his face at Spini's fuming. "You
did not choose your confident very wisely, my Dolfo."

"He's a cursed deal cleverer than you". Francesco, and
handsomer too," said Spini, turning <.ii liis associate with
a general desire to worry anytliing tiiat presented itself,

510 KOMOLA.

"I humbly conceive,'* said Ser Ceccone, "that Messer
Francesco's poetic genius will outweigh "

*' Yes, yes, rub your handsl I hate that notary's trick
of yours," interrupted Spini, whose patronage consisted
largely in this sort of frankness. ''But there conies
Taddeo, or somebody: now's the time! What news, eh?"
he went on, as two Compagnacci entered with heated
looks.

"Bad!" said one. "The people have made up tlieir
minds they were going to have the sacking of Soderini's
house, and now they have been balked we shall have them
turning on us, if we don't take care. I suspect there are
some Mediceans buzzing about among them, and we may
see them attacking your palace over the bridge before long,
unless we can find a bait for them another way."

"I have it!" said Spini, and seizing Taddeo by the belt
he drew him aside to give him directions, while the other
went on telling Cei how the Signoria had interfered about
Soderini's house.

"Ecco!" exclaimed Spini, presently, giving Taddeo a
slight push toward the door. " Go, and make quick work."

CHAPTER LXVII.

WAITING BY THE RIVEB.

About the time when the two Compagnacci went on
their errand, there was another man who, on the opposite
side of the Arno, was also going out into the chill gray
twilight. His errand, apparently, could have no relation to
to theirs; he was making his way to the brink of the river at a
spot which, though within the city walls, was overlooked by
no dwellings, and which only seemed the more shrouded
and lonely for the warehouses and granaries which at some
little distance backward turned their shoulders to the river.
There was a sloping width of long grass and rushes made
all the more dank by broad gutters which here and there
emptied themselves into the Arno.

The gutters and the loneliness were the attraction that
drew this man to come and sit down among the grass, and
bend over the waters that ran swiftly in the channeled
slope at his side. For he had once had a large piece of

WAITING BY THP: RIVER. 511

bread bropght to him by one of those friendly runlets, and
more than ouce a raw carrot and aj^ple-parings. It was
worth while to wait for such chances in a place where
there was no one to see, and often in his restless wakeful-
ness he came to watch here before daybreak; it might save
him for one day the need of that silent bogging which
consisted in sitting on a church-step by the wayside out
beyond the Porta San Frediano,

For Baldassarre hated begging so much that he would
perhaps have chosen to die rather than make even that
spent appeal, but for one reason that made him desire to
live. It was no longer a hope: it was only that possibility
which clings to every idea that has taken complete pos-
session of the mind: the sort of possibility that makes a
woman watch on a headland for the ship which held some-
thing dear, though all her neighbors are certain that the
ship was a wreck long years ago. After he had come out
of the convent hospital, where the monks of San Miniato
had taken care of him as long as he was helpless; after he
had watched in vain for the wife who was to help him, and
had begun to think that she was dead of the pestilence
that seemed to fill all the space since the night he parted
from her, he had been unable to conceive any way in which
sacred vengeance could satisfy itself through his arm. His
knife was gone, and he was too feeble in body to win
another by work, too feeble in mind, even if he had had
the knife, to contrive that it should serve its one purpose.
He was a shattered, bewildered, lonely old man; yet he
desired to live: he waited for something of which he had
no distinct vision — something dim, formless — that startled
him, and made strong pulsations within him, like that
unknown thing which we look for when we start from
sleep, though no voice or touch has waked us, Baldassarre
desired to live; and therefore he crept out in the gray
light, and seated himself in the long grass, and watched
the waters that had a faint promise in tliem.

Meanwhile the Compagnacci were busy at their work.
The formidable bands of armed men, left to do their will
with very little interference from an embarrassed if not
conniving Signoria, had parted into two masses, but both
were soon making their way by different roads toward the
Arno. The smaller mass was making for the Ponte Euba-
conte, the larger for the Ponte Vecchio; but in both the
same words had passed from mouth to mouth as a signal,
and almost every man of the multitude knew that he was

512 ROMOLA.

going to the Via de Bardi to sack a house there. If he
knew no other reason, could he demand a better?

The armed Compagnacci knew something more, for a
brief word of command flies quickly, and the leaders of
tlie two streams of rabble had a jierfect understanding that
they would meet before a certain house a little toward the
eastern end of the Via de Bardi, where the master would
probably be in bed, and be surprised in his morning sleep.

But the master of that house was neither sleeping nor in
bed; he had not been in bed that night. For Tito's anxiety to
quit Florence had been stimulated by the events of the pre-
vious day: investigations would follow in wdiich appeals
might be made to him delaying his departure: and in delay
he had an uneasy sense that there was danger. Falsehood
had prospered and waxed strong; but it had nourished the
twin life. Fear. He no longer wore his armor, he was no
longer afraid of Baldassarre; but from the corpse of that
dead fear a spirit had risen — the undying halit of fear.
He felt l)e should not be safe till he was out of this fierce,
turbid Florence; and now he was ready to go. Maso was
to deliver up his house to the new tenant; his horses and
mules were awaiting him in San Gallo; Tessa and the chil-
dren had been lodged for the night in the Borgo outside
the gate, and would be dressed in readiness to mount the
mules and join him. He descended the stone steps into
the courtyard, he passed through the great doorway, not
the same Tito, but nearly as brilliant as on the day when
he had first entered that house and made the mistake ef
falling in love with Eomola. The mistake was remedied
now: the old life was cast off, and was soon to be far
behind him.

He turned with rapid steps toward the Piazza dei Mozzi,
intending to pass over the Ponte Eubaconte; but as he went
along certain sounds came upon his ears that made him
turn round and walk yet more quickly in the opposite
direction. Was the mob coming into Oltrarno? It was a
vexation, for he would have preferred the more private
road. He must now go by the Ponte Vecchio; and un-
]deasant sensations made him draw his mantle close round
him, and walk at his utmost speed. There was no one to
see him in that gray twilight. But before he reached the
end of the Via de Bardi, like sounds fell on his ear again,
and this time they were much louder and nearer. Could
he have been deceived before? The mob must be coming
over the Ponte Vecchio. Again he turned, from an im-

WAITING BY THE RIVER. 51§

pulse of fear that was stronger than reflection; it was only
to be assured that the mob was actually entering tlie street
from the opposite end. He chose not to go back to his
house: after all they would not attack liim. Still, he had
some valuables about him; and all things except reason
and order are possible with a mob. But necessity does the
work of courage. He went on toward the Ponte^ Vecchio,
the rush and the trampling and the confused voices get-
ting so loud before him that he had ceased to hear them
behind.

For he had reached the end of the street, and the crowd
pouring from the bridge met him at the turning and
hemmed in his way. He had not time to wonder at a sudden
shout before he felt himself surrounded, not, in the first
instance, by an unarmed rabble, but by armed Compag-
nacci; the next sensation was that his cap fell off, and that
he was thrust violently' forward amongst the rabble, along
the narrow passage of the bridge. Then he distinguished
the shouts, " Piagnonel MediceanI Piagnone! Throw him
over the bridge ! "

His mantle was being torn off him with strong pulls
that would have throttled him if the fibula had not given
way. Then his scarsella was snatched at; but all the while
he was being hustled and dragged; and the snatch failed —
his scarsella still hung at his side. Shouting, yelling,
half motiveless execration rang stunningly in his ears,
sj^reading even amongst those who had not yet seen him,
and only knew there was a man to be reviled. Tito's
horrible dread was that he should be struck down or
tramjoled on before he reached the open arches that sur-
mount the centre of the bridge. There was one hope for
him that they might throw him over before they had
wounded him or beaten the strength out of him; and his
whole soul was absorbed in that one hope and its obverse
terror.

Yes — they were at the arches. In that moment Tito,
with bloodless face and eyes dilated, had one of the self-
preserving inspirations that come in extremity. With a
sudden desperate effort he mastered the clasp of his belt,
and flung belt and scarsella forward toward a yard of clear
space against the parapet, crying in a ringing voice —

"There are diamonds! there is gold!"

In the instant the hold on him was relaxed, and there
was a rush toward the scarsella. He threw himself on
the parapet with a desperate leap, and the next moment
33

514 llOMOLA.

j)hinged — plunged with a great plash into the dark river
far below.

It was his chance of salvation ; and it was a good
chance. His life had been saved once before by his fine
swimming, and as he rose to the surface again after his
long dive he had a sense of deliverance. He struck out
with all the energy of his strong prime, and the current
helped him. If he could only swim beyond tlie Ponte
alia Carrara he might land in a remote part of the city,
and even yet reach San Gallo. Life was still before him.
And the idiot mob, shouting and bellowing on the bridge
there, would think he was drowned.

They did think so. Peering over the parapet, along the
dark stream, they could not see afar off the moving black-
ness of the floating hair, and the velvet tunic-sleeves.

It was only from the other way that a pale olive face
could be seen looking white above the dark water: a face
not easy even for the indifferent to forget, with its square
forehead, the long low arch of the eyebrows, and the long-
lustrous agate-like eyes. Onward the face went on the
dark current, with inflated quivering nostrils, with the
blue veins distended on the temples. One bridge was
passed — the bridge of Santa Trinita. Should he risk
landing now rather thaii trust to his strength? No. He
lieard, or fancied he heard, yells and cries pursuing him.
Terror pressed him most from the side of his fellow-men:
lie was less afraid of indefinite chances, and he swam on,
panting and straining. He was not so fresh as he would
have been if he had passed the night in sleep.

Yet the next bridge — the last bridge — was passed. He
was conscious of it; but in the tumult of his blood, he
could only feel vaguely that he was safe and might land.
But wliere? The current was liaving its way with him:
]ie hardly knew wliere lie was: exhaustion was bringing on
the dreamy state tliat precedes unconsciousness.

But now there were eyes that discerned him — aged
eyes, strong for the distance. Baldassarre, looking up
blankly fi^om the search in the runlet that brought him
nothing, had seen a white object coming along the broader
stream. Could that be any fortunate chance for him ?
He looked and looked till the object gathered form: then
lie leaned forward with a start as he sat among the rank
green stems, and his eyes seemed to be filled witli a new
light. Yet lie only watched — motionless. Something
was being brought to him.

WAITING BY THE KlVEIi.

515

The next instant a man's Ijodv was east violently on the
grass two yards from him, and he started forward like a
panther, clutching the velvet tunic as he fell lorward on
the bodv and flashed a look in the mans face.

Dead — was he dead? The eves were rigid. But no, it
could not be — Justice had brought him. Men looked
dead sometimes, and vet the life came bacK into them.
Baldassarre did not feel feeble in that moment. He knew
iu<t what he could do. He got his large fingers withm
the neck of the tunic and held them there, kneeling on
one knee beside the bodv and watching the face. There
was a fierce hope in his heart, but it was mixed with trem-
bling. In his eves there was only fierceness: all the
slow^burniug remnant of life within him seemed to have

leaped intoliame. i i^ ^ n i:;i„

Eiaid -ri^id still. Those eyes with the half -fallen lids
were"locked°against vengeance. Could it be that he ^^s
dead? There was nothing to measure the time: it seemed
lono- enough for hope to freeze into despair.

S°irelv at last the evelids were quivering: t^he eyes were
no'longer rigid. There was a vibrating lignt m them:
thev opened wide. ,„

'^Ah ve*' You see me — vou know me.
Tito' knew him: but he did not know whether it was
life or death that had brought him into tlie presence ot
his iniured father. It might be death- and death might
m;an this chill gloom with the face of the hideous past
hanciuar over him forever. , . .1

But now Baldassarre-s only dread was lest the young
l.Xshould escape him. He pressed h'S knuckles aga.ns
the round throat, and knelt upon the chest yth all the
force of his aged frame. Let death come now

Win he kept his watch on the face. And when the
eves w«ergid 'again, he dared not trust them He would
never lose lis hold till some one catne ''"''found t^em
In^tice would send some witness, and then he, Baidas»arre,
would decire that he had killed this tra.tor -^ whom h
had once been a father. Thev would perhaps believe bim
':t:rdtren''he would be content -t\tlre struggle o
instce on earth — then he would desire to die with ms
•liofd on thiTbodv, and follow the traitor to hell that he

■°'fudt h'kneJt! t'd-so he pressed his knuckles against
the round throat, without trusting ^''fl^Xni\lltt
till the light got strong, and he could kneel no longer.

51(5 RO-MOLA.

Then lie sat on the body, still clutching the neck of the
tunic. But the hours went on, and no witness came. No
eyes descried afar off the two human bodies among the
tall grass by the riverside. Florence was busy with
greater affairs, and the j^roparation of a deeper tragedy.

Not long after those two bodies were lying in the grass,
Savonarola was being tortured, and crying out in his affonv.
"I will confess!"

It was not until the sun was westward that a wagon
drawn by a mild gray ox came to the edge of the grassy
margin, and as the man who led it was leaning to gather
up the round stones that lay heaped in readiness to be
carried away, he detected some startling object in the grass.
The aged man had fallen forward, and his dead clutch was
on the garment of the other. It was not possible to sepa-
rate them : nay, it was better to put them into the wagon
and carry them as they were into the great Piazza, that
notice might be given to the Eight.

As the wagon entered the frequented streets there was a
growing crowd escorting it with its strange burden. No
one knew the bodies for a long while, for the aged face had
fallen forward, half hiding the younger. But before they
had been moved out of sight, they had been recognized.

" I know that old man," Piero di Cosimo had testified.
''I painted his likeness once. He is the prisoner who
clutched Melema on the steps of the Duomo."

" He is perhaps the same old man who appeared at sup-
per in my gardens," said Bernardo Rucellai, one of the
Eight. "I had forgotten him. I thought he had died in
prison. But there is no knowing the truth now."

Who shall put his finger on the work of justice, and say,
" It is there"? Justice is like the Kingdom of God — it is
not without us as a fact, it is within us as a great yearning.

CHAPTER LXVIII.
romola's waking.

RoMOLA in her boat passed from dreaming into long
deep sleep, and then again from deep sleep into busy
dreaming, till at last slie felt herself stretching out her arms
in the court of the Bargello, where the flickering flames

romola's waking.

517

of the tapers seemed to get stronger and stronger till the
dark scene was blotted out with light. Her eyes opened
and she saw it was the light of morning Her boat was
Ivincr still in a little creek; on her rigbt hand lay the
mieckless sapphire-hlue of the Mediterranean; on her left
one of those scenes which were and still are repeated
again and again like a sweet rhythm, on the shores of tliat

In a deep 'curve of the mountains lay a breadth of gi'een
land, curtained bv gentle tree-shadoNved slopes leaning
toward the rocky heights. Up these slopes might be seen
here and there, gleaming between the tree-tops, a path^^a^
leading to a little irregular mass of bui^ldmg that seemed
o hav? clambered in a hasty way up the mountain-side
md taken a difficult stand there for the sake of showing
e tall belfry as a sight of beauty to the scattered and
clustered houses of the village below. The rays of the
new y-risen sun fell obliquely on the westward liorn of this
crescent-shaped nook: all else lay m dewy shadow. No
smmd cameicross the stillness; the very waters seemed to
have curved themselves there for rest. , ,. -n i i ^^

The delicious sun-rays fell on Eomola and hnlled her
gent ? lie a caress. She lay motionless, hardly watchmg
fhe scene; rather, feeling simply the presence f Peac^^^^^^^^
be-iutv While we are still m our youth there can ahNays
come 'in our earlv waking, moments when mere passive
exStence is itself a Lethe, when the exquisiteness of subtle
indefinite sensation creates a bliss which is without mem-
on- a 1 w thout desire. As the soft warmth penetrated
LmoK's vouncr limbs, as her eves rested on this seques-

conscious that she was lymg m the boajj.h.ch had bee ^

er.,d e of a'new life. And in spite of her evening despair
hf«s glad hat the morning had come to her agam: g
0 tlinf that she was resting. in '!;<■ /™ >'="c,:^,^J'f^J

rather than in tt^'t,rd7;;?^o ete t id rS he.

AW;'S!udon';"r"i«lMrf™..> behind the golden

518 ROMOLA.

haze were piercing domes and tov/ers and walls, parted by
a river and enclosed by the green bills.

She rose from lier reclining jDosinre and sat up in the
boat, willing, if slie could, to resist the rush of thoughts
that urged themselves along with the conjecture how far
the boat had carried her. Why need she mind? This was
a sheltered nook where there were simple villagers who
would not harm her. For a little while, at least, she might
rest and resolve on nothing. Presently she would go and
get some bread and milk, and then she would nestle in the
green quiet, and feel that there was a pause in her life.
She turned to watch the crescent-shaped valley, that she
might get back the soothing sense of peace and beauty
Avhich she had felt in her first v^'aking.

She had not been in this attitude of contemplation more
than a few minutes when across the stillness there came a
piercing cry; not a brief cry, but continuous and more
and more intense. Romola felt sure it was the cry of a
little child m distress that no one came to help. She
started up and put one foot on the side of the boat ready
to leap on to the beach; but she paused there and listened:
the mother of the child must be near^ the cry must soon
cease. But it went on, and drew Romola so irresistibly,
seeming the more piteous to her for the sense of peace
Avhicli had preceded it, that she jumped on to the beach
and walked many paces before she knew what direction
she would take. The cry, she thought, came from some
rough garden growth many yards on her right hand, where
she saw a half-ruined hovel. She climbed over a low
broken stoue fence, and made her way across patches of
weedy green crops and ripe but neglected corn. The cry
grew plainer, and convinced that she was right she hastened
toward the hovel; but even in that hurried walk she felt
an opi)ressive change in the air as she left the sea behind.
Was there some taint lurking amongst the green luxuri-
ance that had seemed such an inviting shelter from the
heat of the coming day? She could see the opening into
the hovel now, and the cry was darting through her like a
pain. The next moment her foot was within the doorway,
l3ut the sight she beheld in the sombre light arrested her
with a shock of awe and horror. On the straw, with Avhich
the flooi- was scattered, lay three dead bodies, one of a tall
man, one of a girl about eight years old, and one of a
young woman whose long black hair was being clutched
and pulled by a living child — the child that was sending

romola's waking.

519

forth the piercing cry. Romohi's experience m the hannt*
of death and disease made thought and action prompt:
she lifted the little living child, and m trying to soothe it
on her hosom, still bent to look at the bodies and see if
they were really dead. The strongly marked type of race
in their features, and their peculiar garb, made her con-
iecture that they were Spanish or Portuguese Jews, who
had perhaps been put ashore and abandoned there by
n^pacious sailors, to whom their property remained as a
prey Such things were happening continually to Jews
compelled to abandon their homes by the Inquisition: the
cmelty of greed thrust them from the sea, and the cruelty
of superstition thrust them back to it.

-But, surely," thought Romola, "I sha find some
woman in the yi lage whose mother's heart will not let her
X' to tend this^ helpless child -if the real mother is

"'ThiVdoubt' remained, because while the man and girl
looked emaciated and also showed signs of ^^aymg been
ong dead, the woman seemed to have ^^T^J'^'^Xmlu
had not quite lost the robustness of her form. Komo^^
kneeling, was about to lay her hand on the heart but as
she liftfd the piece of yellow woolen drapery that laj
a OSS thUosoi., she sa^ the purple ^^Pf ^J ^.ttTflh

?he had money to offer them, and they would not retuse

"Cs^rr^^oSS ^^^^r^nSe!^^ mind filled
now with the effort to soothe the little dark creature aiid
•Z woncl^^^^^^^ how she should win some woman to be
'ood to S e could not help hoping a little m a certain
?we she Imd obseryed herself to inspire, when she appeared
i^k^wn and --P^^f^- ^ J^ 2^^|- ^X n^?^

to haye something fearful in it ^^ J"'^'''^''^! •, ^l^gi-e

520 KOAIOLA.

less life she carried in her arms. But she had picked up

two figs, and bit little pieces from the sweet pulp to still
the child with.

She entered between two lines of dwellings. It was time
that villagers should have been stirring long ago, but not a
soul was in sight. The air was becoming more and more
oppressive, laden, it seemed, with some horrible impurity.
There was a door open; she looked in, and saw grim empti-
ness. Another open door; and through that she saw a man
lying dead with all his garments on, his head lying athwart
a sj^ade handle, and an earthenware cruse in his hand, as if
he had fallen suddenly.

Romola felt horror taking possession of her. Was she ^
in a village of the unburied dead ? She wanted to listen .i^
if there were any faint sound, but the child cried out
afresh when she ceased to feed it, and the cry filled her
ears. At last she saw a figure crawling^ slowly out of a
house, and soon sinking back in a sitting posture against
the wall. She hastened toward the figure; it was a voung
woman in fevered anguish, and she, too, held a pitcher in
her hand. As Romola approached her she did not start;
the one need was too absorbing for any other idea to impress
itself on her.

"Water! get me water!" she said, with a moaning
utterance.

Romola stooped to take the pitcher, and said gently in
her ear, " You shall have water; can you point toward the
well?"

The hand was lifted toward the more distant end of the
little street, and Romola set off at once with as much
speed as she could use under the difficulty of carrying the
pitcher as well as feeding the child. But the little one was
getting more content as the morsels, of sweet puljD were
repeated, and ceased to distress her with its cry, so that
she could give a less distracted attention to the objects
around her.

The well lay twenty yards or more beyond the end of the
street, and as Romola was approaching it hei- eyes were
directed to tlie opposite green slope immediately below the
church. Iligli np, on a patch of grass between the trees,
she had descried a- cow and a couple of goats, and she tried
to trace a line of path that would lead her close to that
cheerino- sight, when once she had done her errand to the
well. Occupied in this way, she was not aware that she
was very near the well, and that some one ap2:>roaching it

romola's waking. 521

on the other side had fixed a pair of astonished eyes upon
her.

Eomola certainly presented a sight which, at that
moment and in that phice, could hardly hare heen seen
without some pausing and palpitation. "With hor gaze
fixed intently on the distant slope, the long lines of her
thick gray garment giving a gliding character to her rapid
walk, her hair rolling backward and illuminated on the
left side by the sun-rays, the little olive baby on her right
arm now looking out with jet-black e3'es, she might well
startle that youth of fifteen, accustomed to swing the
censer in the presence of a Madonna less fair and marvel-
ous than this.

" She carries a pitcher in her hand — to fetch water for
the sick. It is the Holy Mother, come to take care of the
people who have the pestilence."

It was a sight of awe: she would, perhaps, be angry with
those who fetched water for themselves only. The youth
flung down his vessel in terror, and Eomola, aware now of
some one near her, saw the black and white figure fly as if
for dear life toward the slope she had just been contem-
plating. But remembering the parched sufferer, she half-
filled her pitcher quickly and hastened back.

Entering the house to look for a small cnp, she saw salt
meat and meal: there were no signs of want in the dwell-
ing. "With nimble movement she seated the baby on the
ground, and lifted a cup of water to the sufferer, who
drank eagerly and then closed her eyes and leaned her
head backward, seeming to give herself up to the sense of
relief. Presently she opened her eyes, and, looking at
Romola, said languidlv —

"Who are you?"

"I came over the sea," said Romola. ''I only came
this morning. Are all the people dead in these houses?"

"I think they are all ill now — all that are not dead.
My father and my sister lie dead up stairs, and there is no
one to bury them: and soon I shall die."

"Xot so^, I hope," said Romola. ''I am come to take
care of you. I am used to the pestilence; I am not afraid.
But there must be some left who are not ill. I saw a
vouth running toward the mountain when I went to the
Well."

''I cannot tell. When the pestilence came, a great
many people went away, and drove off the cows and goats.
Give me more water I"

522 KOMOLA.

Romola, suspecting that if she followed the direction
of the youth's flight, she should find some men and
women who were still healthy and able, determined to
seek them out at once, that she might at least win them
to take care of the child, and leave her free to come back
and see how many living needed help, and how many dead
needed burial. She trusted to her poAvers of i)ersuasion
to conquer the aid of the timorous, when once she knew
what was to be done.

Promising the sick woman to come back to her, she
lifted the dark bantling again, and set off toward the slope.
She felt no burden of choice on her now, no longing for
death. She was thinking how she would go to the other
sufferers, as she had gone to that fevered woman.

But, with the child on her arm, it M^as not so easy to her
as usual to walk up a slope, and it seemed a long while
before the winding path took her near the cow and the
goats. She was beginning herself to feel faint from heat,
hunger and thirst, and as she I'caehed a double turning, ,she
paused to consider whether she would not wait near the
cow, which some one was likely to come and milk soon,
rather than toil up to the church before she had taken yny
rest. Eaising her eyes to measure the steep distance, she
saw peeping between the boughs, not more than five yards
off, a broad, round face, watching her attentively, and
lower down the black skirt of a priest's garment, and a
hand grasping a bucket. She stood mutely observing, and
the face, too, remained motionless. Eomola had often
Avitnessed the overpowering force of dread in cases of
pestilence, and she was cautious.

Raising her voice in a tone of gentle pleading, she said,
*'I came over the sea. I am hungry, and so is the child.
Will you not give us some milk?"

Romola had divined part oC the truth, but she had not
divined that preoccupation of the priest's mind which
charged her words with a strange significance. Only a
little while ago, the young acolyte had brought word to tlu'
Padre that he had seen the Holy Mother with the Babe,
fetcliing water for the sick: she was as tall as the cypresses,
and had a light about her head, and she looked up at the
church. The pievano (parish priest) had not listened
with entire belief: he had been more than fifty years in
the M'orld without having any vision of the Madonna, and
he thought the boy might luive misinterpreted the
unex])ected appearance of a villager. But he had been

romola's wakixg. 523

made uneasy, and before venturing to come down and
milk his cow, he had repeated numerous AveiS. The
pievano's conscience tormented him a little: he trembled
at the pestilence, but he also trembled at the thought of
the mild-faced Mother, conscious that that Invisible Mercy
might demand something more of him than prayers and
"'Hails." In this state of mind — unable to banish the
image the boy had raised of the Mother with the glory
about her tending the sick — the pievano had come down
to milk his cow, and had suddenly caught sight of Romola
pausing at the parted way. Her pleading Avords, with
their strange refinement of tone and accent, instead of
being explanatory, had a preternatural sound for him.
Yet he did not quite believe he saw the Holy Mother: he
was in a state of alarmed hesitation. If anything miracu-
lous were happening, he felt there was no strong presump-
tion that the miracle Avould be in his favor. He dared not
run away; he dared not advance.

''Come doAvn," said Romola, after a pause. "Do not
fear. Fear rather to deny food to the hungry when they
as'k you."

A moment after, the boughs were parted, and the com-
plete figure of a thick-set priest with a broad, harmless
face, his black frock much worn and soiled, stood, bucket
m hand, looking at her timidly, and still keeping aloof as
he took the patli toward the cow in silence.

Romola followed him and watched him without speaking
again, as he seated himself against the tethered cow, and,
when he had nervously drawn some milk, gave it to her in
a brass cup he carried with him in the bucket. As Romola
put the cup to the lips of the eager child, and afterward
drank some milk herself, the Padre observed her from his
wooden stool with a timidity that changed its character a
little. He recognized the Hebrew baby, he was certain
that he had a substantial woman before him; but there
was still something strange and unaccountable in Romola's
presence in this spot, and the Padre had a presentiment
that things were going to change with him. Moreover,
that Hebrew was terribly associated with the dread of
pestilence.

Nevertheless, when Romola smiled at the little one
sucking its own milky lips, and stretched out the brass cup
again, saying, "Give us more, good father," he obeyed
less nervously than before.

Romola on her side was not unobservant; and when the

524 ROMOLA.

second supply of milk had been drunk, she looked down
at the round-headed man, and said with mild decision —

"And now tell me, father, how this pestilence came,
and why you let your people die without the sacraments,
and lie unburied. For I am come over the sea to help
those who are left alive — and you, too, will help them now/'

He told her the story of the pestilence: and while he
was telling it, the youth, who had fled before, had come
peeping and advancing gradually, till at last he stood and
watched the scene from behind a neighboring bush.

Three families of Joavs, twenty souls in all, had been
put ashore many weeks ago, some of them already ill
of the pestilence. The villagers, said the priest, had of
course refused to give shelter to the miscreants, otherwise
than in a distant hovel, and under heajDS of straw. But
when the strangers had died of the plague, and some of
the peojile had thrown the bodies into the sea, the sea had
brought them back again in a great storm^ and everybody
was smitten with terror. A grave was dug, and the bodies
were buried; but then the pestilence attacked the Chris-
tians, and the greater num])er of the villagers went aAvay
over the mountain, driving away tlieir few cattle, and car-
rying provisions. The priest had not fled; he had stayed and
prayed for the people, and he had prevailed on the youth
Jacopo to stay with him; but he confessed that a mortal
terror of the plague had taken hold of him, and he had
not dared to go down into the valley.

"You wall fear no longer, father," said Romola, in a
tone of encouraging authority; "you will come down with
me, and we will see who is living, and we will look for the
dead to bury them. I have walked about for months where
the pestilence was, and see, I am strong. Jacopo will come
with us," she added, motioning to the peeping lad, who
came slowly from behind his defensive bush, as if invisible
threads were dragging him.

"Come, Jacopo," said Romola again, smiling at him,
"you will carry the child for me. See! your arms are
strong, and I am tired."

That was a dreadful proposal to Jacopo, and to the priest
also; but they were both under a peculiar influence forcing
tliem to obey. The suspicion that Romola was a suiDcrnat-
ural form was dissipated, but their minds were filled instead
with the more effective sense that she was a human being
whom God had sent over the sea to command them.

ROMOLA S WAKING, 525

"NoWAVe will carry down the milk/' said Romola, ''and
see if any one wants it."

So they went all together down the sloi)e, and that
morning the sufferers saw help come to them in tlieir
despair. There were hardly more than a score alive in the
whole valley; but all of these were comforted, most were
saved, and the dead were buried.

In tliis way dav's, weeks, and months passed with Komola
till tlie men were digging and sowing again, till the women
smiled at her as they carried their great vases on their
heads to the well, and the Hebrew baby was a tottering
tumbling Christian, Benedetto by name, having been ba]!-
tized in the church on the mountain-side. But by that
time she herself was suffering from the fatigue and lan-
guor that must come after a continuous strain on mind
and body. She had taken for her dwelling one of the
liouses abandoned by their owners, standing a little aloof
from the village street; and here on a thick heap of clean
straw — a delicious bed for those who do not dream of
down — she felt glad to lie still through most of the day-
light hours, taken care of along with the little Benedetto
by a woman whom the pestilence had widowed.

Every day the Padre and Jacopo and the small flock of
surviving villagers paid their visits to this cottage to
see the blessed Lady, and to bring her of their best as
an offering — honey, fresh cakes, eggs, and polenta. It
was a sight they could none of them forget, a sight they
all told of in their old age — how the sweet and sainted
lady with her fair face, her golden hair, and her brown
eyes that had a blessing in them, lay weary with her labors
after she had been sent over the sea to help them in their
extremity, and how the queer little black Benedetto used to
crawl about the straw by her side and want everything
that was brought to her, and she always gave him a bit of
what she took, and told them if they loved her they must
be good to Benedetto.

Many legends were afterward told in that valley about
the blessed Lady who came over the sea, but they were
legends by which all who heard might know that in times
gone by a^voman had done beautiful loving deeds there,
rescuing those who were ready to perish.

OxJb EOMULA.

CHAPTER LXIX.

HOMEWARD.

In those silent wintry hours when Romola lay resting
from her weariness, her mind, traveling back over the past,
and gazing across the undefined distance of the future,
saw all objects from a new position. Her experience since
the moment of her waking in the boat had come to her
with as strong an effect as that of the fresh seal on the
dissolving wax. She had felt herself without bonds, with-
out motive; sinking in mere egoistic complaining that life ^i
could bring her no content; feeling a right to say, "1 am
tired of life, I want to die." That thought had sobbed
within her as she fell asleep, but from the moment after
her waking when the cry had drawn her, she had not even
reflected, as she used to do in Florence, that she was glad
to live because she could lighten sorrow — she had simply
lived, with so energetic an impulse to share the life around
her, to answer the call of need and do the work which
cried aloud to be done, that the reasons for living, endur-
ing, laboring, never took the form of argument.

The exj^erience was like a new baptism to Romola. In
Florence the simpler relations of the human being to his
fellow-men had been complicated for her with all the
special ties of marriage, the State, and religious disciple-
ship, and when these had disappointed her trust, the
shock seemed to have shaken her aloof from life and
stunned her sympathy. But now she said, " It was mere
baseness in me to desire death. If everything else is
doubtful, this suffering that I can help is certain; if the
glory of the cross is an illusion, the sorrow is only the
truer. While the strength is in my arm I will stretch it
out to the fainting; while the light visits my eyes they
shall seek the forsaken."

And then the past arose with a fresh appeal to her.
Her work in this green valley was done, and the emotions
that were disengaged from the people immediately around
her rushed back into the old deep channels of use and
affection. That rare possibility of self-contemplation
which comes in any comijlete severance from our wonted
life made her judge herself as she had never done before:
the compunction which is insejiarable from a sympathetic
nature keenly alive to the possible experience of others.

began w stir in her with growing force. She questioned
the iustness of her own conehisions, of her own deeds:
she had been rash, arrogant, always dissatisfied that others
Avere not good enough, while she herself had not been
true to wnat her soul had once recognized as the best.
She began to condemn her flight: after all, it had been
cowardly self-care; the grounds on which Savoranola had
once taken her back were truer, deeper than the grounds
she had had for her second flight. How could she feel
the needs of others and not feel, above all, the needs ot

the nearest? ■, -,. i, ri^i

But then came reaction against such self-reproach, l lie
memory of her life with Tito, of the conditions which
made their real union impossible, while their external
union imposed a set of false duties on her which were
essentially the concealment and sanctioning of what her
mind revolted from, told her that flight had been her
only resource. All minds, except such as are delivered
from doubt by dullness of sensibility, must be subject to
this recurring^ conflict where the many-twisted conditions
of life have forbidden the fulfillment of a bond. For m
strictness there is no replacing of relations: the presence
of the new does not nullify the failure and breacli of the
old Life has lost its perfection: it has been maimed; and
until the wounds are quite scarred, conscience continually
casts backward, doubting glances.

Romola shrank with dread from the renewal ot hei
proximity to Tito, and yet she was uneasy that she had
put herself out of reach of knowing what was his tate —
uneasy that the moment might yet come when ^ej;o|ild
he in misery and need her. There was still a thread of
pain within her, testifying to those ^^^'^.^ «^ .^^^^ /l^, ^f
amo, that she could not cease to be a wife. <^<^"W any-
thing utterly cease for her tliat had once mingled itsclt
with the current of her heart's blood.-'

Florence, and all her life there, had come back to ha
like huncrer; her feelings could not go wandering attei the
o'sible and the va^ue: their living fibre ^f/^f\^"th the
memo y of familial things. And the thought that she had
divXt herself from them forever became more and moie
t^nL in these hours that were unfilled wih ac lom
What if Fra Girolamo had been ™g.^ ^^ hat the U e
of Florence was a web of inconsistencies.-' ^ ab she, then
^oniethTnrhic^her. that she should shake the dust f rom otf
irfeet 1uid=sav, -This world is not good enough lor

528 ttOMOLA.

me^'? If she had been really higher, she would not so
easily have lost all her trust.

Her indignant grief for her godfather had no longer
complete possession of her, and her sense of debt to Savon-
arola was recovering predominance. Nothing that had
come, or was to come, could do away with the fact that
there had been a great inspiration in him which had waked
a new life in her. Who, in all her experience, could
demand the same gratitude from her as he? His errors —
might they not bring calamities?

She could not rest. She hardly knew whether it was
her strength returning with the budding leaves that made
her active again, or whether it was her eager longing to
get nearer Florence. She did not imagine herself daring to
enter Florence, but the desire to be near enough to learn
what was happening there urged itself with a strength that
excluded all other jDurposes.

And one March morning the people in the valley were
gathered together to sec the blessed Lady depart. Jacopo
had fetclied a mule for her, and was going with her over
the mountains. The Padre, too, was going with her to the
nearest town, that he might help her in learning the safest
way by which she might get to Pistoja. Her store of
trinkets and money, untouched in this valley, was abun-
dant for her needs.

If Eomola had been less drawn by the longing that was
taking her away, it would have been a hard moment for
her when she Avalked along the village street for the last
time, while the Padre and Jacopo, with the mule, were
awaiting her near the well. Her steps were hindered by
the wailing people, who knelt and kissed her hands, then
clung to her skirts and kissed the gray folds, crying, *'Ah,
why will you go, when the good season is beginning and
the crops will be plentiful? Why Avill you go?"

''Do not be sorry," said Romola, "you are well now. and
I shall remember you. I must go and see if my own peojile
want me."

"Ah, yes, if they have the pestilence!"

"Look at us again. Madonna!"

"Yes, yes, we will be good to the little Benedetto!"

At last Romola mounted her mule, but a vigorous
screaming from Benedetto as he saw her turn from him in
this new position, was an excuse for all the people to follow
her and insist that he must ride on the mule's neck to the
foot of the slope.

MEETING AGAIN. 529

The parting must come at last, but as Romola turned
continually before she passed out of sight, she saw the
little flock lingering to catch the last waving of her hand.

CHAPTER LXX.

MEETING AGAIN.

On the fourteenth of April Eomola was once more within
the walls of Florence. Unable to rest at Pistoja, where
contradictory reports reached her about the Trial by Fire,
she had gone on to Prato; and was beginning to think that
she should be drawn on to Florence in spite of dread, when
she encountered that monk of San Spirito who liad been
her godfather's confessor. From him she learned the tuU
story of Savonarola's arrest, and of her liusband s death.
This Aucrustinian monk had been in the stream of people
who had'' followed the wagon with its awful burden into
the Piazza, and he could tell her what was generally known
in Florence— that Tito had escaped from an assaulting mob
bv leapino- into the Arno, but had been murdered on the
bank by an old man who had long had an enmity against
him But Romola understood the catastrophe as no one
else did. Of Savonarola the monk told her, in that tone
of unfavorable prejudice which was usual m the Black
Brethren (Frati ^^eri) toward the brotlier who showed
white under his black, that he had confessed himself a
deceiver of the people. .

Romola paused no longer. That evening she was m
Florence, sitting in agitated silence under the exclamations
of iov and walling, mingled with exuberant narrative,
which were poured into her ears by Monna Brigida who
had backslided into false hair in Romola s absence, bat naw
drew it off again and declared she would not mind being
gray, if her dear child would stay with her.

Romola was too deeply moved by the mam events which
she had known before coming to Florence to ^e wrought
upon by the doubtful gossiping details added inBiigicUs
narrative The tragedv of her husbands death, ot J^ra
Girotamo's confession of duplicity under the coercion of
torture, left her hardly any power of ^m^rdiending minor
circumstances. All the mental activity she could exert
34

530 KU-MOLA.

under that load of awe-stricken grief, was absorbed by two
purposes which must supersede every other: to try and see
Savonarola, and to learn what had become of Tessa and
the children.

"Tell me, cousin," she said abruptly, when Monna Bri-
gida's tongue had run quite away from troubles into proj-
ects of Romola's living with her, "has anything been seen
or said since Titers death of a young woman with two little
children?''

Brigida started, rounded her eyes, and lifted up her
hands.

"Cristo! no. What! was he so bad as that, my poor
child? Ah, then, that was why you went away, and
left me word only that you went of your own free will.
Well, well; if I'd known that, I shouldn't have thought
you so strange and flighty. For I did say to myself,
though I didn't tell anybody else, 'What was she to go
away from her husband for, leaving him to mischief, only
because they cut poor Bernardo's head off? She's got her
father's temper,' I said, 'that's what it is.' AYell, well;
never scold me, child: Bardo tons fierce, 3'ou can't deny it.
But if you had only told me the truth, that there was a
young hussey and children, I should have understood it
all. Anything seen or said of her? No; and the less the
better. They say enough of ill about him without that.
But since that was the reason you went "

" No, dear cousin," said Romola, interrupting her ear-
nestly, "pray do not talk so. I wish above all things to
find that young woman and her children, and to take care
of them. They are quite helpless. Say nothing against it;
that is the thing I shall do first of all."

"Well," said Monna Brigida, shrugging her shoulders
and lowering her voice with an air of discomfiture, " if that's
being a Piagnone, I've been taking peas for paternosters.
Why, Fra Girolamo said as good as that widows ought not
to marry again. Step in at the door and it's a sin and a
shame, it seems; but come doAvn the chimney and you're
welcome. Two children — Santiddiol"

"Cousin, the jDoor thing has done no conscious wrong:
she is ignorant of everything. I will tell you — but not
now."

Early the next morning Romola's steps were directed to
the house beyond San Ambrogio where she had once found
Tessa; but it was as she had feared: Tessa avms gone.
Romola conjectured that Tito had sent her away before-

MEETING AUAIN.

531

hand to some spot Avhere he hud intended to join her for
she did not believe that he would willingly part with those
children. It was a painful conjecture, because, it iessa
were out of Florence, there was hardly a chance ot hnd-
incr her and Romola pictured the childish creature wait-
in^ and waiting at some wayside spot m wondering
heMe^s misery. Those who lived near could tell her
nothing except that old deaf Lisa had gone a^;ay a week
nao with her goods, but no one knew where Tessa had
crone Romola saw no further active search open to her;
for she had no knowledge that could serve as a starting
point for inquiry, and not only her innate reserve but a
more noble sensitiveness made her shrink from assuming
an attitude' of generosity in the eves of others by P^|blish-
ing Tessa's relation to Tito, along with her own desire to find
hei-. Manv days passed in anxious inaction. Even under
stron- solicitation from other thoughts Eomola found he
heart" palpitating if she caught sight of a pair of round
brown legs, or of a short woman in the contadma cbess.

She neTcr for a moment told herself that it was heroism
or exalted charity in her to seek these beings; she needed
something that she was bound specia ly to care for; she
e^.ed to clasp the children and make them love her
This at least would be some sweet result, foi others
as well as herself, from all her past sorrow. It appears
?here was much property of Tito's to which she had a
chdm- but she distrusted the cleanness of that money
ad he had determined to make it all over to the
8Hte except so much as was equal to the price of her
f! her's 1 biavy. This would be enough for the modest
u port of Tessa and the children. But Monna Brigida
■ew such planning into the background by clamoroiisly
^"Ttii o- that Romola must live with her and never foi-
K^rtill she had seen her safe m P--dise-cdse wh>
had she persuaded her to turn Piagnone?-and it ^^J" o^^
vmited to rear other people's children s^ie, Monna Bngida.

i^ ,. fi.n,.-, inn Onlv thev must be found first.
'" R mok S " 1^ ull ?;i^ of ^hat innuendo But strong
fee in u s^iHsfied is never without its superstition either
of Ime or despair. Romola's was the superstition ot
ot Hope 01 ae.iJc mother and the chil-

"^^ X l1^r"n!:?he:^direction for active inquiry
dien. ^Y ;<^.V' m learned that Tito had provided

thorrforc going to leave Floveuce by the gate of ban

532 ROMOLA.

Gallo, and she determined, though without much confi-
dence in the issue, to try and ascertain from the gate-
keepers if they had observed any one corresponding to
the descri])tion of Tessa, with her cliildren, to have passed
the gates before the morning of the ninth of April.
Walking along the Via San Gallo, and looking AvatchfuUy
about her through her long widow's veil, lest she should
miss any object that might aid her, she descried Bratti
chaffering with a customer. That roaming man, she
thought, might aid her; she would not mind talking of
Tessa to liim.. But as she put aside her veil and crossed
the street toward him, she saw something hanging from
the corner of his basket which made her heart leap with a
much stronger hope.

''Bratti, my friend," she said abruptly, "where did you
get that necklace?"

" Your servant, madonna," said Bratti, looking round
at her very deliberately, his mind not being subject to
surprise. "It's a necklace worth money, but I shall get
little by it, for my heart's too tender for a trader's; I have
promised to keep it in pledge,"

" Pray tell me where you got it; — from a little woman
named Tessa, is it not true?"

"Ah! if you know her," said Bratti, "and would
redeem it of me at a small profit, and give it her again,
you'd be doing a charity, for she cried at parting with
it — you'd have thought she was running into a brook."
It's a small profit I'll charge you. You shall have it for
a florin, for I don't like to be hard-hearted,"

"Where is she?" said Eomola, giving him the money,
and unclas^jing the necklace from the basket in joyful
agitation.

" Outside the gate, there, at the other end of the Borgo,
at old Sibilla Manetti's: anybody will tell you which is the
house,"

Eomola went along with winged feet, blessing that
incident of the Carnival which had made her learn by
heart the appearance of this necklace. Soon she was at
the house she sought. The young woman and the children
were in the inner room — were to have been fetched away a
fortnight ago and more — had no money, only their clothes,
to pay a poor widow with for their food and lodging. But

since madonna knew them Romola waited to hear no

more, but opened the door,

Tessa was seated on the low bed: her crying had passed

MEETING AGAIN, -^3^

into tearless sobs, and she was looking with sad blank
eyes at the two children, who were playing in an opposite
eorner— Lillo covering his head with his skirt and roaring
ut :N"inna to frighten her, then peeping out again to see
how she bore it. The door was a little behind Tessa, and
she did not turn round when it opened, thinking it was
only the old woman: expectation was no longer alive.
Eomola had thrown aside her veil and paused a moment,
holding the necklace in sight. Then she said, m that pure
voice that used to cheer her father —
"Tessa I"

Tessa started to her feet and looked round.
*'See," said Eomola, clasping the beads on Tessa s neck,
"God has sent me to you again."

The poor thinly screamed and sobbed, and clung to the
arms that fastened the necklace. She could not speak
The two children came from their corner, laid hold ot
their mother's skirts, and looked up with wide eyes at
Eomola. ,, _,..,, . ,i^

That day they all went home to Monna Brigida s, m tne
Borgo degii Albizzi. Eomola had made known to Tessa by
genUe degrees, that Naldo could never come to her again:
not because he was cruel, but because he was dead.

" But be comforted, my Tessa/' said Eomola. • 1 am
come to take care of you always. And we have got LUlo

and Xinna." , , i ■, ,

Alonna Bri^rida's mouth twitched m the struggle between
her awe of Eomola and the desire to speak unseasonably.

"Let be, for the present," she thought; " but it seems
to me a thousand years till I tell this little contadina who
seems not to know how many fingers she's got on her hand
who Eomola is. And I iciU tell her some clay, else she 11
never know her place. It's all very well or Eoinola -
nobodv will call their souls their own when she s by, but it
I'm to have this puss-faced minx living in my house she

must be humble to me." . ,i,;i,i,.p„ too

However, Monna Brigida wanted to give the f^^ldi^n \°^

many sweets for their supper and confessed to Eomola

the last thing before going to bed that it ^^ould be a

shame not to take care of such cherubs

" But vou must c^ive up to me a little, Eomola, aoout

theii eatfng Td those things. For you have never had a

babv, a^d f had twins, only^they died as soon as they were

born."

5b4 ROMOLA.

CHAPTER LXXI.

THE COXFESSIOISr.

Whex Eomola brouglit home Tessa and the children,
April was already near its close, and the other great anxiety
on her mind had been wrought to its highest pitch by the
publication in ])rint of Fra Girolamo's Trial, or rather of
the confessions drawn from him by the sixteen Florentine
citizens commissioned to interrogate him. The appearance
of this document, issued by order of the Signoria, had
called forth such strong expressions of public opinion and
discontent, that severe measures were immediately taken
for recalling it. Of course there were copies accidentally
mislaid, and a second edition, not by order of the Signoria,
was soon in the hands of eager readers.

Romola, who began to despair of ever speaking with Fra
Girolamo, read this evidence again and again, desiring to
judge it by some clearer light than the contradictory
impressions tliat were taking the form of assertions in the
mouths of both partisans and enemies.

In the more devout followers of Savonarola his want of
constancy under torture, and his retraction of projihetic
claims, had produced a consternation too profound to be at
once displaced as it ultimately was by the suspicion, which
soon grew into a jDositive datum, that any reported words
of his Vvhich were in inexplicable contradiction to their
faith in him, had not come from the lips of the prophet,
but from the falsifying pen of Ser Ceccone, that notary of
evil repute, who had made the digest of the examination.
But there were obvious facts that at once threw discredit
on the printed document. Was not the list of sixteen
examiners half made up of the prophet's bitterest enemies?
Was not the notorious Dolfo Spini one of the nQv>' Eight
prematurely elected, in order to load the dice against a
man whose ruin had been determined on by the party in
jjower? It was but a murder with slow formalities that
was being transacted in the Old Palace, The Signoria had
resolved to drive a good bargain with the Pope and the Duke
of Milan, by extinguishing the man who was as great a
molestation to vicious citizens and greedy foreign tyrants
as to a corrupt clergy. The Frate had been doomed
beforehand, and the only question that was pretended to
exist now was, whether the Republic, in return for a per-

THE COXFKSSIOX. 535

mission to lay a tax onecclesia.-;tical property, sliould deliver
him alive into the hands of the Pope, or wliether the Pope
should further concede to the Republic what its dignity
demanded — the privilege of hanging and burning its own
prophet on its own })iazza.

Who, under such circumstances, would give full credit
to this so-called confession? If the Frate had denied his
prophetic gift, tlie denial had only been wrenclied from
him by the agony of torture— agony that, in his sensitive
frame, must quickly produce raving. What if these
wicked examiners declared that he had only had the tor-
ture of the rope and the pulley thrice, and only on one
day, and that his confessions had been made when he was
under no bodily coercion — was that to be lielieved? He
had been tortured much more; he had been tortured in
proportion to the distress his confessions had created in the
hearts of those who loved him.

Other friends of Savonarola, who were less ardent par-
tisans, did not doubt the substantial genuineness of the
confession, however it might have been colored by the
trans2)ositions and additions of the notary; but they argued
indignantly that there was nothing which could warrant a
condemnation to death, or even to grave punishmoit. It
must be clear to all impartial men that if this examination
represented the only evidence against the Frate, he would
die, not for any crime, but because he had made himself
inconvenient to the Pope, to the rapacious Italian States
that wanted to dismember their Tuscan neighbor, and to
those unworthy citizens who sought to gratify their j^rivate
ambition in opposition to the common weal.

Not a shadow of political crime had been 25roved against
him. Xot one stain had been detected on his private con-
duct: his fellow-monks, including one who had formerly
been his secretary for several years, and who, with more
than the average culture of his companions, had a disj^osi-
tion to criticise Fra Girolamo's rale as Prior, bore testi-
mony, even after the shock of his retractation, to an unim-
peachable purity and consistency in his life, which had
commanded their unsuspecting veneration. The Po2)e
himself liad not been able to raise a charge of heresy
against the Frate, except on the ground of disobedience to
a mandate and disregard of the sentence of excommunica-
tion. It was difficult to justify that breach of discijjline
by argument, but there was a moral insurgeuce in the minds
of grave men against the Court of Rome, which tended to

536 ROMOLA.

confound the theoretic distinction between the Church
and churchmen, and to lighten the scandal of dis-
obedience.

Men of ordinary morality and public spirit felt that the
triumph of the Frate's enemies Avas really the triumph of
gross license. And keen Florentines like Soderini and Piero
Guicciardini may well have had an angry smile on their
lips at a severity which dispensed with all law in order to
hang and burn a man in whom the seductions of a public
career had warped the strictness of his veracity; may
well have remarked that if the Frate had mixed a much
deeper fraud with a zeal and ability less inconvenient to
high personages, the fraud would have been regarded as an
excellent oil for ecclesiastical and political wheels.

Nevertheless such shrewd men were forced to admit
that, however poor a figure the Florentine government
made in its clumsy pretense of a judicial warrant for what
had in fact been predetermined as an act of policy, the
measures of the Pope against Savonarola were necessary
measures of self-defense. Not to try and rid himself of a
man who wanted to stir up the Powers of Europe to sum-
mon a General Council and depose him, would have been
adding ineptitude to iniquity. There was uo denying that
toward Alexander VI. Savonarola was a rebel, and, what
was much more, a dangerous rebel. Florence had heard
him say, and had well undc "stood what he meant, that
he would not obey the devil. It was inevitably a life and
death struggle between tlie Frate and the Pope; but it was
less inevitable that Florence should make itself the Pope's
executioner.

Romola's ears were filled in this way with the sugges-
tions of a faith still ardent under its wounds, and the
suggestions of worldly discernment, judging things accord-
ing to a very moderate standard of what is possible to
human nature. She could be satisfied with neither. She
br(jught to her long meditations over that printed docu-
ment many painful observations, registered more or less
('onsciously through the ye£},rs of her discipleship, which
whispered a presentiment that Savonarola's retractation of
]iis prophetic claims was not merely a spasmodic effort to
escape from torture. But, on the other hand, her soul
cried out for some explanation of his lapses which would
make it still possible for her to believe that the main
striving of his life had been pure and grand. The recent
memory of the selfish discontent which had come over her

THE CONFESSION. 537

like a blighting wind along with the loss of her trust in
the man who had been for her an incarnation of the high-
est motives, had produced a reaction which is knov/n to
many as a sort of faith that has sprung np to them out of
the very depths of their desj^air. It M'as impossible, she
said now, that the negative disbelieving thoughts which
had made her soul arid of all good, could be founded in
the truth of things: impossible that it had not been a
living spirit, and no hollow pretense, which had once
breathed <n the Frate's words, and kindled a new life in
her. Whatever falsehood had been in him, had been a
fall and not a purpose; a gradual entanglement in which
he struggled, not a contrivance encouraged by success.

Looking at the printed confessions, she saw many sen-
tences which bore the stamp of bungling fabrication: they
had that emphasis and repetition in self-accusation which
none but very low hypocrites use to their fellow-men.
But the fact that these sentences were in striking opposi-
tion, not only to the character of Savonarola, but also to
the general tone of the confessions, strengthened the
impression that the rest of the text represented in the
main what had really fallen from his lips. Hardly a word
was dishonorable to him except what turned on his pro-
phetic annunciations. He was unvarying in his statement
of the ends he had pursued for Florence, the Church, and
the world; and, apart from the mixture of falsity in that
claim to special inspiration by which he sought to gain
hold of men's minds, there was no admission of having
used unworthv means. Even in this confession, and
without expurgation of the notary's malign phrases, Fra
Girolamo shone forth as a man who had sought his own
glorv indeed, but sought it by laboring for the very highest
end— the moral welfare of men— not by vague exhortations,
but by striving to turn beliefs into energies that would
work in all the details of life.

''Everything that I have done," said one memorable
passage, which may perhaps have had its erasures and
interpolations, "I have done with the design of being for-
ever famous in the present and in future ages: and that I
might win credit in Florence; and that nothing of great
import should be done without my sanction. And when I
had thus established my position in Florence, I had it in
my mind to do great things in Italy and beyond Italy, by
means of those chief personages with whom I had con-
tracted friendship and consulted on high matters, such as

538

romola.

this of the General Council. And in proportion as my
first efforts sncceecled, I should have ado2)tcd further
measures. Above all, when the General Council had once
heen brought about, I intended to rouse the princes of
Christendom, and especially those beyond tlie borders of
Italy, to subdue the infidels. It was not much in my
thoughts to get myself made a Cardinal or Pope, for when
I should have achieved the work I had in view, I should,
without being Pope, have been the first man in the world
in the authority I should have possessed, and ttie reverence
that would have been paid me. If I had been made Poj)e,
I would not have refused the office: but it seemed to me
that to be the head of that work was a greater thing tlian
to be Pope, because a man without virtue may be Pope;
but sucti a ivorh as I contemplated demanded a man of
excellent virtues."

That blending of ambition with belief in tlie supremacy
of goodness made no new tone to Eomola, who had been
used to hear it in the voice that rang through the Duomo.
It was the habit of Savonarola's mind to conceive great
things, and to feel that he was the man to do them.
Iniquity should be brought low; the cause of justice,
purity, and love should triumph; and it should triumph
])y his voice, by his work, by his blood. In moments of
ecstatic contemplation, doubtless, the sense of self melted
in the sense of the Unspeakable, and in that part of his
experience lay the elements of genuine self-abasement; but
in the presence of his fellow-men for whom he was to act,
pre-eminence seemed a necessary condition of his life.

And perhaps this confession, even when it described a
doublcness that was conscious and deliberate, really implied
no more than that wavering of belief concerning his own
impressions and motives which most human beings who
have not a stupid inflexibility of self-confidence must be
liable to under a marked change of external conditions.
In a life where the experience was so tumultuously mixed
as it must have been in the Prate's, what a possibility was
opened for a change of self-judgment, when, instead of
eyes that venerated and knees that knelt, instead of a
great work on its way to accomplishment, and in its pros-
perity stamping the agent as a chosen instrument, there
came the hooting and the spitting and the curses of the
crowd; and then the Imrd faces of enemies made judges;
and then the horrible torture, and with the torture the
irrepressible cry, ''It is true, what you would have me say:

THE COXFESSIOX. 539

let me go: do not torture me ugaiu: yes, yes, I am guilty.
0, God! Thy stroke has reached mcl"

As Eomola tliought of the angui,-jh that must have
followed the confession — wlietlier, in the sul)seqaent soli-
tude of the prison, conscience retracted or confirmed the
self-taxing words — that anguish seemed to be pressing on
her own heart and urging the slow, bitter tears. Every
vulgar, self-ignorant person in Florence was glibly pro-
nouncing on this man's demerits, while he was knowing a
depth of sorrow which can only be known to the soul that
has loved and sought the most perfect thing, and beholds
itself fallen.

She had not then seen — what she saw afterward — the-
evidence of the Frate's mental state after he had had thus
to lay his mouth in the dust. As the days went by, the
reports of new unpublished examinations, eliciting no
change of confessions, ceased; Savonarola was left alone in
his prison and allowed pen and ink for a while, that, if he
liked, he might use his poor bruised and strained right
arm to write with. He wrote; but what he wrote was no
vindication of his innocence, no protest against the pro-
ceedings used toward him: it was a continued colloquy
Avith that divine purity witli which he sought complete
reunion. It was the outpouring of self-abasement; it was
one long cry for inward renovation. Xo lingering echoes
of the old vehement self-assertion, " Look at my work, for
it is good, and those who set their faces against it are tlio
children of the devil !" The voice of Sadness tells him,
''God placed thee in the midst of the people even as if
thou hadst been one of the excellent. In this way thou
hast taught others, and hast failed to learn thyself. Thou
hast cured others: and thou thyself hast been still diseased.
Tliy heart was lifted up at tlie beauty of thy own deeds,
and through tliis thou hast lost thy wisdom and art become,
and shalt be to all eternity, nothing. * * * After su
many benefits with which God has honored thee, thou
art fallen into the depths of the sea; and after so many
gifts bestowed on thee, thou, by thy pride and vainglory ,
hast scandalized all the world." And when Hope speaks
and argues that the divine love has not forsaken him, it
says nothing now of a great work to be done, but only
says, "Thou art not forsaken, else why is thy heart bowed
in penitence? That, too, is a gift."

There is no jot of worthy cvidonce tliat, from the tune
ol^ his imprisonment to the' supreme moment, Savonarola

O-tO ROMOLA.

tliought or sj)oke of himself as a martyr. The idea of
martyrdom had been to him a passion dividing the dream
of the future witli the triumph of beholding his work
achieved. And now. in place of both, had come a resig-
nation which he called by no glorifying name.

Btit therefore he may tlte more jitly he called a martyr
ly his fellow-men to all time. J'or power rose against
him, not because of his sins, but because of his great-
ness— not because he sought to deceive the world, but
because he sought to make it noble. And through that
greatness of his he endured a double agony: not only the
reviling, and the torture, and the death-throe, but the
agony of sinking from the vision of glorious achievement
into that deep shadow where he could only say, "I count
as nothing: darkness encompasses me: yet the light I saw
was the true light."

CHAPTER LXXII.

THE LAST SILEXCE.

RoMOLA had seemed to hear, as if they had been a cry,
the words repeated to her by many lips — the words uttered
by Savonarola when he took leave of those brethren of
San Marco who had come to witness his signature of the
confession: "Pray for me, for God has withdrawn from
me the spirit of prophecy."

Those words had shaken her with new doubts as to the
mode in which he looked back at the past in moments of
complete self-possession. And the doubts were strength-
ened by more piteous things still, which soon reached
her ears.

The nineteenth of May had come, and by that day's
sunshine there had entered into Florence the two Papal
Commissaries, charged with the completion of Savonarola's
trial. They entered amid the acclamations of the people,
calling for "the death of the Frate. For now the popular
cry was, "It is the Frate's deception that has brought on
all our misfortunes; let him be liurncd, and all things
right Avill be done, and our evils will cease."

The next day it is well eertilied tluit tliere was fresh and
fresh tortuj-e of the shattered sensitive frame; and now, at

THE LAST SILENCE. 541

the first sight of the horrible implements, Savonarola, in
convulsed agitation, fell on his knees, and in brief pas-
sionate words retracted his confession, declared ^hat he
had spoken falsely in denying his prophetic gift, ana
if he suffered, he would suffer for the truth — '''.l
things that I have spoken, I had them from God."

But not the less the torture was laid upon him, and
when he was under it he was asked why he had uttered
those retracting words. Men were not demons in those
days, and yet nothing but confessions of guilt were held
a reason for release from torture. The answer came: "1
said it that I might seem good; tear me no more, I will
tell you the truth."

There were Florentine assessors at this new trial, and
those words of twofold retractation had soon spread. They
filled Eomola with dismayed uncertainty.

"But" — it flashed across her — "there will come a
moment when he may speak. When there is no dread
hanging over him but the dread of falsehood, when they
have brought him into the presence of death, Avhen he is
lifted above the people, and looks upon them for the last
time, they cannot hinder him from speaking a last decisive
word. I will be there."

Three days after, on the twenty-third of May, 1498,
there was again a long narrow platform stretching across
the great piazza, from the Palazzo Vecchio toward the
Tetta de Pisani. But there was no grove of fuel as
before: instead of that, there was one great heap of fuel
placed on the circular area which made the termination of
the long narrow platform. And above this heap of fuel
rose a gibbet with three halters on it; a gibbet which,
having two arms, still looked so much like a cross as to
make some beholders uncomfortable, though one arm had
been truncated to avoid the resemblance.

On the marble terrace of the Palazzo were three
tribunals; one near the door for the bishop, who was to
perform the ceremony of degradation on Fra Girolamo
and the two brethren who were to suffer as his followers
and accomplices; another for the papal commissaries, who
were to pronounce them heretics and schismatics, and
deliver them over to the secular arm: and the third, close
to Marzoeco, at the corner of the terrace Avhere the plat-
form began, for the Gonfaloniere, and the Eight who were
to pronounce the sentence of death.

Again the Piazza was thronged wiih expectant faces:

542 R03I0LA.

again there was to be a great fire kindled. In the majority
of the crowd that pressed around the gibbet the expecta-
tion was that of ferocious hatred, or of mere hard curiosity
to behold a barbarous sight. But there were still many
spectators on the wide jiavement, on the roofs, and at the
windows, who, in the midst of their bitter grief and their
own endurance of insult as h3q30critical Piagnoni, were
not without a lingering hope, even at this eleventh hour,
that God would interpose, by some sign, to manifest their
beloved prophet as his servant. And there were yet more
Avho looked forward with trembling eagerness, as Eomola
did, to that final moment when Savonarola might say,
''0 people, I was innocent of deceit."

Romola was at a window on the north side of the Piazza,
far away from the marble terrace where the tribunals
stood; and near her, also looking on in painful doubt con-
cerning the man who had won his early reverence, was a
young Florentine of two-and-twenty, named Jacopo Nardi,
afterward to deserve honor as one of the very few who,
feeling Fra Girolamo's eminence, have written about him
with the simple desire to be veracious. He had said to
Romola, Avith respectful gentleness, when he saw the strug-
gle in her between her shuddering horror of the scene and
her yearning to witness what might happen in the last
moment —

" Madonna, there is no need for you to look at these
cruel things. I will tell you when he comes out of the
Palazzo. Trust to me; I know what you would see."

Romola covered her face, but the hootings that seemed
to make the hideous scene still visible could not be shut
out. At last her arm was touched, and she heard the words.
*'He comes." She looked toward the Palace, and could
see Savonarola led out in his Dominican garb; could sec
him standing before the Bishop, and being stripped of the
Mack mantle, the white scapulary and long Avhite tunic,
iill he stood in a close woolen under-tunic, that told of no
sacred office, no rank. He had been degraded, and cut oif
from the Church Militant.

The baser part of the multitude delight in degradations,
apart from any hatred; it is the satire they best under-
stand. There was a fresh hoot of triumph as the three
degraded brethren passed on to the tribunal of the Papal
Commissaries, who were to pronounce them schismatics
and heretics. Did not the prophet look like a schismatic

EPILOGUE. \ 543

and heretic now? It is easy to believe in the damnable
state of a man who stands stripped and degraded.

Then the third tribunal was passed — that of the Floren-
tine officials who were to pronounce sentence, and amongst
whom, even at her distance, Romola could discern the
odions figure of Dolfo Spini, indued in the grave black
lucco, as one of the Eight.

Then the three figures, in their close white raiment, trod
their wav along the platform, amidst yells and grating
tones of insult.

•'Cover your eyes. Madonna," said Jacopo Xardi; "^Fra
Girolamo will be the last."

It was not long before she had to uncover them again.
Savonarola was there. He was not far off her now. He
had mounted the steps; she could see him look round oii
the multitude.

But in the same moment expectation died, and she only
saw what he was seeing — torches waving to kindle the fuel
beneath his dead body, faces glaring with a yet worse light;
.she only heard what he was hearing — gross jests, taunts,
and curses.

The moment was past. Her face was covered again, and
she only knew that Savonarola's voice had passed into
eternal silence.

EPILOGUE.

On the evening of the twenty-second of May, 1509, five
persons, of whose history we have known something, were
seated in a handsome upper room opening on to a loggia
which, at its right-hand corner, looked all along the Borgo
Pinti, and over the city gate toward Fiesole, and the solemn
heights bevond it.

At one end of the room was an archway opening into a
narrow inner room, hardly more than a recess, where the
light fell from above on a small altar covered with fair
white linen. Over the altar was a picture, discernible at
the distance where the little party sat only as the small
full-length portrait of a Dominican Brother. For it was
shaded from the light above by overhanging branches and
wreath> of flowers, and the fresli tapers below it were unlit.

544 ROMOLA.

But it seemed that the decoration of the altar rud its
recess was not complete. For part of the floor was r,trewn
with a confusion of flowers and green boughs, and among
them sat a delicate blue-eyed girl of thirteen, tossing her
long light-brown hair out of her eyes, as she made
selections for the wreaths she was weaving, or looked up at
her mother's work in the same kind, and told her how to
do it with a little air of instruction.

For that mother was not very clever at weaving fliowers
or at any other work. Tessa's fingers had not become
more adroit with the years — only very much fatter. She
got on slowly and turned her head about a good deal, and
asked Ninna's opinion with much deference; for Tessa
never ceased to be astonished at the wisdom of her children.
She still wore her contadina gown: it was only broader
than the old one; and there was the silver pin in her rough
curly brown hair, and round her neck the memorable
necklace, Avith a red cord under it, that ended mysteriously
in her bosom. Her rounded face wore even a more per-
fect look of childish content than in her younger days:
everybody was so good in the world, Tessa thought; even
Monna Brigida never found fault with her now, and did
little else than sleej), which Avas an amiable practice in
everybody, and one that Tessa liked for herself.

Monna Brigida was asleep at this moment, in a straight-
backed arm-chair, a coujdIo of 3^ards off. Her hair, part-
ing backward under her black hood, had that soft white-
ness which is not like snow or anything else, but is simply
the lovely whiteness of aged hair. Her chin had sunk on
her bosom, and her hands rested on the elbow of her chair.
She had not been weaving flowers or doing anything else:
she had only been looking on as usual, and as usual had
fallen asleep.

The other two figures were seated farther off, at the wide
doorway that opened on to the loggia. Lillo sat on the
ground with his back against the angle of the door-post,
and his long legs stretched out, while he held a large book
open on his knee, and occasionally made a dash with his
hand at an inquisitive fly, with an air of interest stronger
than that excited by the finely-printed copy of Petrarch
which he kept open at one place, as if he were learning
something by heart.

Romola sat nearly opposite Lillo, but she was not observ-
ing him. Her hands were crossed on her lap and her eyes
were fixed absentlv on the distant mountains: she was evi-

EPILOGUE. 545

dently unconscious of anything around her. An eager
life had left its marks upon her: the finely-moulded cheek
had sunk a little, the golden crown was less massive; but
there was a placidity in Eomola's face which had never
belonged to it in youth. It is but once that we can know
our worst sorrows, and Romola had known them while life

was new.

Absorbed in this way, she was not at first aware that
Lillo had ceased to look at his book, and was watching her
with a slightly impatient air, which meant that he wanted
to talk to her, but was not quite sure whether she would
like that entertainment just now. But persevermg looks
made themselves felt at last. Komola did presently turn
away her eyes from the distance and met Lillo's impatient
dark gaze with a brighter and brighter smile. He shuffled
along the floor, still keeping the book on his lap, till he
got close to her and lodged his chin on her knee.

"What is it, Lillo?" said Romola, pulling his hair back
from his brow. Lillo was a handsome lad, but his features
were turning out to be more massive and less regular than
his father's. The blood of the Tuscan peasant was in his

veins.

"Mamma Romola, what am I to be?'' he said, well con-
tented that there was a prospect of talking till it would be
too late to con " Spirto gentil " any longer.

"What should you like to be, Lillo? You might be a
scholar. My father was a scholar, you know, and taught
me a great deal. That is the reason why I can teach

■^^" Yes," said Lillo, rather hesitatingly. " But he is old
and blind in the picture. Did he get a great deal of

glory ^"

"Not much, Lillo. The world was not always very
kind to him, and he saw meaner men than himself put
into higher places, because they could flatter and say what
was false. And then his dear son thought it right to leave
him and become a monk; and after that, my father, being
blind and lonely, felt unable to do the things that would
have made his learning of greater use to men, so that he
might still have lived in his works after he was in his

^^'a' should not like that sort of life," said Lillo. "I
should like to be something that would make me a great
man, and very happy besides— something that would not
hinder me from having a good deal of pleasure.
85

J
' 546 ROMOLA.

"■ That is not easy, my Lillo. It is only a poor sort of hap-
piness that could ever come by caring very much about
our own narrow jDleasures. We can only have the highest
happiness, such as goes along with being a great man, by
having wide thoughts, and much feeling for the rest of the
world as well as ourselves; and this sort of hapi^iness often
brings so much pain with it, that we can only tell it from
pain by its being what we would choose before everything
else, because our souls see it is good. There are so many
things wrong and difficult in the world, that no man can
be great — he can hardly keep himself from wickedness —
nnless he gives up thinking much about pleasure or
rewards, and gets strength to endure what is hard and
painful. My father had the greatness that belongs to
integrity; he chose poverty and obscurity rather than
falsehood. And there was Fra Girolamo — you know why
I keep to-morrow sacred: he had the greatness which
belongs to a life spent in struggling against powerful
wrong, and in trying to raise men to the highest deeds
they are capable of. And so, my Lillo, if you mean to
act nobly and seek to know the best things God has put
within reach of men, you must learn to fix your mind on
that end, and not on what will happen to you because of
it. And remember, if you were to choose something lower,
and make it the rule of your life to seek your own pleasure
and escape from what is disagreeable, calamity might
come just the same; and it would be calamity falling on a
base mind, which is the one form of sorrow that has no
balm in it, and that may well make a man say, — ' It would
have been better for me if I had never been born.' I will
tell you something, Lillo."

Eomola paused for a moment. She had taken Lillo's
cheeks between her hands, and his young eyes were meet-
ing hers.

"There was a man to whom I was very near, so that I
could see a great deal of his life, who made almost every
one fond of him, for he was young, and clever, and beau-
tiful, and his manners to all were gentle and kind. I
believe, when I first knew him, he never thought of any-
thing cruel or base. But because he tried to slip away
from everything that was unpleasant, and cared for noth-
ing else so much as his own safety, he came at last to
commit some of the basest deeds — such as make men
infamous. He denied his father, and left him to misery;
he betrayed every trust that was reposed in him, that he

EPILOGUE. 547

might keep himself safe and get rich and prosperous. Yet
calamity overtook him."

Again Romola paused. Her voice Avas unsteady, and
Lillo was looking up at her with awed wonder.

* 'Another time, my Lillo — I will tell you another time.
See, there are our old Piero di Cosimo and Nello coming
up the Borgo Pinti, bringing us their flowers. Let us go
and wave our hands to them, that they may know we see
them."

"How queer old Piero is!" said Lillo, as they stood at
the corner of the loggia, watching the advancing figures.
*' He abuses you for dressing the altar, and thinking so
much of Fra Girolamo, and yet he brings you the flowers. "

" Never mind," said Romola. " There are many good
people who did not love Fra Girolamo. Perhaps I should
never have learned to love him if he had not helped me
when I was in great need."

THE END,

r»^;

' ' fv

PR
4656
Al
188A

Eliot, George (pseud.) i.e.
Marian Evans, afterv/ards Cross
Adam Bede New ed.

PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE
CARDS OR SLIPS FROM THIS POCKET

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